The Adelaide Review - September Issue by The Adelaide Review

THE ADELAIDE

REVIEW ISSUE 415 SEPTEMBER 2014

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

CAO FEI Chinese video artist Cao Fei is part of an exciting OzAsia visual arts program

BRIAN OLDMAN

WORK FOR THE DOLE

JOCK & DUNCAN

Ilona Wallace profiles the Director of the South Australian Museum

Economy experts Stephen Koukoulas and John Spoehr aren’t impressed by the Work for the Dole scheme

Chefs Duncan Welgemoed and Jock Zonfrillo discuss Adelaide’s food resurgence

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4 The Adelaide Review September 2014

WELCOME

TheAdelaideReview

ISSUE 415

AdelaideReview

editor David Knight davidknight@adelaidereview.com.au Digital Manager Jess Bayly jessbayly@adelaidereview.com.au

ART DIRECTOR Sabas Renteria sabas@adelaidereview.com.au ADMINISTRATION & DISTRIBUTION Kate Mickan katemickan@adelaidereview.com.au

Hill of Grace

NATIONAL SALES AND MARKETING MANAGER Tamrah Petruzzelli tamrah@adelaidereview.com.au ADVERTISING EXECUTIVES Tiffany Venning Michelle Pavelic advertising@adelaidereview.com.au

Dennis Leslie explains his latest venture as Executive Sous Chef of Adelaide Oval’s new Hill of Grace restaurant

INSIDE Features 05 Opinion 12

MANAGING DIRECTOR Manuel Ortigosa

Publisher The Adelaide Review Pty Ltd, Level 8, Franklin House 33 Franklin St Adelaide SA 5000. GPO Box 651, Adelaide SA 5001. P: (08) 7129 1060 F: (08) 8410 2822. adelaidereview.com.au

Columnists 14 Fashion 16 Circulation CAB. Audited average monthly, circulation: 28,648 (April 12 – March 13) 0815-5992 Print Post. Approved PPNo. 531610/007

Disclaimer Opinions published in this paper are not necessarily those of the editor nor the publisher. All material subject to copyright. This publication is printed on 100% Australian made Norstar, containing 20% recycled fibre. All wood fibre used in this paper originates from sustainably managed forest resources or waste resources.

THE ADELAIDE

review

Books 17 Performing Arts 18 Visual Arts 28 Food. Wine. Coffee 35 Travel 48 FORM 49

Beethoven Fest

Daniel + Emma

The ASO will celebrate the David Bowie of his time with this month’s Beethoven Fest

The renowned local designers talk about their new roles at Jam Factory

COVER CREDIT: Cao Fei, My future is not a dream.

Contributors. Leanne Amodeo, Selena Battersby, DM Bradley, John Bridgland, Stephen Forbes, Charles Gent, Roger Hainsworth, Koren Helbig, Andrew Hunter, Stephen Koukoulas, Jane Llewellyn, Kris Lloyd, John Neylon, John Spoehr, Shirley Stott Despoja, Paul Ransom, Christina Soong, Graham Strahle, Ilona Wallace, Paul Wood. Photographer: Jonathan van der Knaap

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The Adelaide Review September 2014 5

FEATURE Western Railway in that they had a lot of old locomotives, well passed their use-by date, modified and improved to extend their life way beyond when they should have and there were locomotives running around that were 80 years old in 1929. They were running beside the new crop of steam locomotives. By choosing that particular period, I’ve got a really huge breadth of models I can pursue to bring that era to life.” Willis inherited a steam locomotive from his father last year.

Paul Willis and Professor Tanya Monro

Off Topic:

Paul Willis

Off Topic and on the record as South Australian identities talk about whatever they want... except their day job. RiAus Director Dr Paul Willis is passionate about trains of the steam variety; just don’t ask if he is a trainspotter. by David Knight

“

Everyone needs an addiction, don’t they?” Willis begins. “I’ve had two in life – two things from childhood that I never grew out of. One was dinosaurs and fossils. I made a career out of that. The other was trains. I remember as a small boy getting up in the middle of the night to watch the little steam train run across the back of the garden in England. That was the London Underground and at night they’d turn the electricity off, so they had a little steam train that would run the services and works trains around. It’s gone on from there in all sorts of directions. I’ve always had a model railway of various scales and different interests. That’s evolved into a very specialised form of model

railway called P4, which is a long, complicated and very boring story. But essentially it’s a scale of 4mm to one foot, and I model the Great Western Railway [Britain] as it was in June 1929 on the 23rd of June at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. We like to get things right when we do P4.” Willis says his tongue was slightly in cheek when describing the to-the-hour accuracy of his model railway. “It’s not really June the 23rd at 3pm, it is specific to 1929 and I’m modeling the midto-late summer of 1929. That was a really interesting time in the evolution of the Great

“Several years ago he built a live steam locomotive; five-inch gauge, you’re talking about a locomotive that’s about a foot-and-ahalf long, weighs in at something like 40kg. You have to put coal in it, boil the water and run it as you would a real steam locomotive. I inherited that from him last year, and joined up with the guys up at Millswood, SASMEE – South Australian Society of Model & Experimental Engineers – so I’m learning to drive real steam engines and, let me tell you, that’s a sheer joy. It’s romance. It’s a beautiful thing. “Steam is the closest mankind has come to creating a living organism. It’s a wonderful organic power that you have to understand and work with in order to make it work at all. So, my interest in trains is quite diverse. I’m a member of quite a number of preserved railways across the country. The Zig Zag Railway in NSW, Puffing Billy in Melbourne and I’m looking at getting involved with the guys at Pichi Richi. It’s important to me. This is a bit of heritage, our history in railways, particularly steam railways; they built this nation. They built England, the United Sates, South America, everywhere you go, most of the 19th and 20th century, those nations were built on steam railways. We’re rapidly losing all of those; there are fewer and fewer people left who can remember when steam was dominant and the only form of power on our railways. I think it’s incumbent on enthusiasts to keep that heritage alive so that the next generation can get some appreciation of how important these things were to building the world as it is today.” Then there is Willis’s 1924 Queensland

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railway carriage, parked up at St Kilda’s Tramway Museum, which he is restoring into a holiday home. “I’m completely rebuilding it so that it will have a bathroom, toilet and kitchen, it will have a dining area and lounge. Instead of buying a kit and anchoring it in the ground, I’ve got a railway carriage. It will probably work out cheaper. In fact, I know it will be less than half the price of buying a kit for a holiday home and going down the conventional route. Plus, there’s the fun and privilege of having a heritage railway carriage to maintain and look after.” Do people close to Willis think he takes his passion too far? “I think some people would be horrified to know how much I’m prepared to spend to get an original light fitting for it [the carriage]. Look, they don’t come up on eBay that often and when they do come up you’ve got to grab them, that’s my sole rationale for going to any length I can to ensure these things are acquired by me for a good purpose. Yes, I suppose often I go much further than anybody else would tolerate or any sane person would tolerate, but that’s the point of a hobby. That’s the point of an addiction, it’s something you can delve so deeply into, so you can escape from everything else that’s happening in your life.” Given Willis has a diverse train passion, was he ever a trainspotter? “I never had an anorak. I never had a thermos full of cocoa and sat at the end of platforms to take train numbers, that’s going too far, that’s just stupidity,” he laughs. “I’ve always gone out of my way to see beautifully restored steam locomotives but no, not a trainspotter.”

»»RiAus is an Adelaide-based national science communication hub riaus.org.au

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6 The Adelaide Review September 2014

Profile

Into the Treasure Chest When he was a boy – eight or nine years old – South Australian Museum Director Brian Oldman used to keep fossils and minerals in a shoebox under his bed. by Ilona Wallace

ldman believes that most people find their passion when they are at that young age: scientists he has met over many years working for the British Museum, London Zoological Society and more, have all encountered a particular fascination in their childhoods that sparked life-long missions of discovery. “I thought [a museum] was where subjects came alive in a way that they didn’t in a classroom,” Oldman says, “so I always had this dream that maybe I could work in a museum. But I was never an academic; I never thought that I would pursue that path.” While he did go to university – studying English and History for his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Bristol – Oldman spent the first years of his professional life working

in business and marketing. His ‘museum life’ began as the Commercial Director of the National Maritime Museum (London). Since then, Oldman has progressed through a number of internationally renowned cultural and natural history institutions. Now, as the Director of SA Museum, Oldman brings change to a role usually occupied by venerated researchers and scientists. Recently, the director’s hat has been worn by Professors Tim Flannery, Suzanne Miller and Andy Lowe. For Oldman, it was the return of his childhood curiosity and a serendipitous shift in museum attitudes that fostered his entry into cultural institutions. “The museum sector started to change, and it began looking for people with management skills, business skills, communication skills,”

he says. “I thought, ‘Well, here’s a way I can actually marry what is a great interest with the skillset that I’ve got’.”

job at the South Australian Museum and also to come and live in Adelaide; it’s a fantastic place to live.

The lure of SA Museum’s expansive collections and Adelaide’s lifestyle convinced Oldman that the Museum was where he was supposed to be.

“People of Adelaide are very proud to live in Adelaide, and I think that’s quite right,” he says. “I’ve travelled quite a lot and it’s quite noticeable that people who live in Adelaide love living here and actually enjoy living here; there are not a lot of places that I’ve come across

“I was just delighted when I was offered a

The Adelaide Review September 2014 7

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PROFILE where that’s been expressed as much as it is here.”

a wealth of choice at his fingertips in terms of programming and direction in the coming years.

Oldman enthusiastically lists collection after collection that he is astounded by at the SA Museum: Aboriginal Cultures, Pacific Cultures, minerals, birds and fish, the Ediacaran and Cambrian research sites – and even the southern hemisphere’s largest frozen-tissue bank.

“Museums are fascinating places; they’re treasure chests,” he effuses. Decisively, Oldman’s focus will be relevance, and making the research and collections appropriate and enthralling to contemporary audiences.

Collections like this last one are a museum director’s challenge: while dedicated to research, there must be a way of communicating the scale and significance of these bodies of work to a broader audience.

“We shouldn’t be looking at things in isolation in the distant past, and we shouldn’t necessarily be looking at cultures in isolation, separated from where we are. We need to look at the lessons that can be applied today and actually how it’s relevant to people’s lives today.

“We’ve got lots of glass jars full of alcohol and parasites; those aren’t going to lend themselves to great display,” Oldman explains. “How does one access that collection, in order to give the greatest benefit to visitors? That can be done by changing objects in galleries, that’s one way of doing it; it can be by our exhibition program; it can be having displays of a small number of objects in greater depth; it can be through – in some degree – opening up our ‘behind the scenes’, which is something I’m very keen to do. It could be the digitisation of the collection.”

“That’s really how a museum becomes a living and breathing thing. It shouldn’t be something that just looks at the past, it’s actually a thing that looks at the present and the future as well; I think that’s incredibly important.”

With four million objects to choose from across the Museum’s six sites, Oldman has

samuseum.sa.gov.au

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8 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

EXTRACT

Anthony Trollope Down Under Anthony Trollope – author of 47 novels – was the first celebrity in popular culture to visit Australia and New Zealand.

or nearly 18 months in the early 1870s, at the peak of his literary fame, he explored the Australasian colonies by stage coach, trains, steamships, and (as a passionate foxhunting man) on horseback. His 1873 memoir inspired by those adventures, Australia and New Zealand, was subsequently described by The Times as “the best account” of those colonies “yet published”. Now, to mark the forthcoming bicentenary of Trollope’s birth, the Adelaide author Nigel Starck reveals the full story in his new book The First Celebrity: Anthony Trollope’s Australasian Odyssey (published by Lansdown Media UK). Although Trollope enthused about the virtues of immigration, he also accused Australians (especially those in Melbourne) of being braggarts and, as a result, found himself castigated by the colonial press. This extract from The First Celebrity begins with Trollope’s observations on Adelaide, where he had arrived, by coastal steamer from Albany and after sleeping rough in the bush, in the autumn of 1872: When the Alexandra delivered him to South Australia, Trollope was ready for some renewed clubmanship. He achieved entrée consequently to the potted palms and antimacassars of the Adelaide Club, enjoying the companionship of the pastoralist and politician Thomas Elder, who supplied accommodation at his mansion in the foothills. Welcoming the “eminent novelist”, The South Australian Register said it expected “a very different picture of colonial life, manners, and resources” from that recorded by “disappointed adventurers and shallow tourists”. It ﬂoated the hope too

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art University of South Australia

that he would give a public lecture. Although the newspaper would be disappointed in that respect, its wishes were subsequently met – if not entirely to the pleasure of its readers – in the depth of reporting that Trollope devoted to the colony of South Australia. There was nothing shallow about it. In a stay of a little over five weeks, he was able to tour widely, often through Thomas Elder’s patronage. They even became lost on one sortie into the pastoralist’s more remote northerly properties, finding shelter at a farmhouse occupied temporarily by an explorer (probably Ernest Giles) whose tranquil confidence and resolve caused Trollope to liken him in his memoir to “Marco Polo … or a Livingstone”. An inspection of the copper mining townships north of Adelaide resulted in another such mishap, as Trollope would recall in his travel book: On our return journey we were absolutely lost in the bush – coach, coachman, horses, mails, passengers and all. … At last we found ourselves on the seashore … [and although] no one could say what sea it was, I felt that the adventure was almost more than interesting. Back in the colony’s capital, Trollope attended parliamentary debates. In print, he would dismiss as trivial the subject matters before the house: they included argument on the lighting of horsedrawn cabs and on whether a bishop should be entitled to certain matters of etiquette at social gatherings. As a postal official of long standing, he looked around the new post office (writing that it was “a beautiful building”, if somewhat deficient in its mail-handling capacities); sampled the wine

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‘A Welcome Guest’. The Melbourne Punch cartoon greeting Anthony Trollope when he disembarked in July 1871 (National Library of Australia).

(“heady”, was his verdict); and was appalled at the state of the River Torrens. At the time of Trollope’s visit, it had long suffered abuse through being used both as a source of water supply and as an open sewer. “Anything in the guise of a river more ugly than the Torrens it would be impossible either to see or to describe,” he wrote.

“appliances of humanity”, succeeded in leaving a favourable impression on Trollope: “No city in Australia,” he declares in Australia and New Zealand, “gives one more ﬁxedly the idea that Australian colonization has been a success, than does the city of Adelaide”. Baronetcy postscript

The unfortunate watercourse aside, Adelaide, with its extensive parklands and generous

His younger son, Frederic, established

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The Adelaide Review September 2014 9

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Opinion

Modern Times Modern Abandonment BY Andrew Hunter

Frederic Trollope in 1878, aged three, a grandson of the celebrated novelist. He succeeded to the family baronetcy in 1937 (Hugh Trollope private collection)

himself as an inspector with the NSW Lands Department after an unsuccessful flirtation with sheep farming. He and his wife, Susannah, had eight children. The family baronetcy, created in 1642 but in Anthony Trollope’s time sequestered within other branches of the family, would eventually come to Australia – after death in war and misfortunes elsewhere. Frederic’s third son (a Sydney bank manager, also named Frederic) succeeded to the title in 1937. The baronetcy has remained in Australia ever since. It is at present held by Sir Anthony Trollope, 17th Baronet (great-greatgrandson of the novelist), a schoolteacher who lives at Windsor NSW. It survives as a satisfying epilogue to the memoirs and philosophy of Anthony Trollope, tireless traveller, inveterate adventurer, and the first celebrity to visit Australasia.

»»Excerpt from The First Celebrity: Anthony Trollope’s Australasian Odyssey by Nigel Starck. pub. Lansdown Media UK; 209 pages. RRP $29.95. The book will be launched by Sir Anthony Trollope at the Friends of the University of Adelaide Library meeting, Thursday September 25, Barr Smith Library, 6pm

t is deeply moving to hold the hand of a 92-year-old man as he takes his final breath. My grandfather passed peacefully, with few regrets. He lived a full life, fulfilled the farmer’s creed of giving more back to the land than he took, was happily married for 50 years, and raised a wonderful daughter. He spent the last six months of his life in a nursing home. Regret only touches the living. The passage from self-reliance to nursing home is now an accepted part of modern life. When an elderly person is no longer selfsufficient, they are quietly shifted to a nursing home. The modern elephant is left little option but to quietly shuffle off to its graveyard. When removed from the family environment, many elderly people struggle with loneliness. The attention and support they receive in their final days, weeks and months vary greatly, depending on the quality of the establishment. Public aged-care facilities are often inadequately resourced, exacerbating the sense of abandonment. Prior to the industrial revolution, it was considered normal for a family to look after its elderly members. During the 19th century, the state started sharing some of the responsibility for aged care. Today, aged care sits uneasily between two concepts struggling to keep pace with modern times. We are no longer moved by a sense of shared responsibility for vulnerable members of our society, nor do family concerns take precedence over self-interest. In a speech made to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in 2012, (then) Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey identified ‘filial piety’ as the reason why many Asian societies were

able to sustain lower levels of taxation. Hockey asserted that family-oriented attitudes in Asia substitutes for our western preference for social security. The ideogram for filial piety represents the father being carried by the son. In many Confucian-inspired East Asian societies, the first-born son was traditionally responsible for his parents. He remained in the family home and cared for his parents until the grave. The changes necessary for families to support their own in a modern western society, however, would require a significant cultural shift. It is certainly not possible to achieve such a shift whilst simultaneously advocating positions that reduce the time working people spend with their immediate families (be it children or parents). Time spent providing care for family members is time spent out of the workplace and is thus discouraged by the business community and many economists and political leaders. In modern Australia, it is now accepted that families are no longer solely responsible for their own from cradle to grave. Working families are encouraged to make these choices in the national economic interest, irrespective of circumstance. Single parents must work because it is nigh impossible to survive on state support. In two parent families, both are encouraged to return to work even as their newborn child’s horizons are limited to the view from the cradle. Everyone is encouraged to work, consume, and keep up with the Joneses. Australians will now retire later and work

longer hours throughout their career as their children are sent to childcare and their parents are sent to nursing homes. The proportion of elderly citizens in our society is increasing but fewer people are willing to support measures that would guarantee that they enjoy a dignified and happy conclusion to their lives. Both sides of politics strive to provide lower tax regimes, and services have suffered accordingly. The standard of universal care is below the level required to guarantee our elderly citizens anything but a remote and lonely stroll to the grave. We must provide a reasonable level of medical and emotional attention to our parents and grandparents, as we hope to be cared for in the future. Humans enter the world in a fragile state – a condition in which we will leave it. It is incumbent upon society to guarantee a level of care and attention at the end of one’s life, as at its beginning. We cannot continue to accept the thinking that leaves us bankrupt of time, nor use it as an excuse to obviate all responsibility. We are the elephants of the future, and the graveyards to which we will be shunted will look even less appealing than those available today.

»»Andrew Hunter is Chair of Australian Fabians fabians.org.au @AndrewHunter_

10 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

WORK FOR THE DOLE

A Band-Aid Solution BY STEPHEN KOUKOULAS

he Abbott Government’s proposal for a Work for the Dole scheme is yet another win for economic zealotry over proven policy reform.

Work for the Dole is an unimaginative and obsolete idea that is wheeled out from time to time when conservative governments pretend to do something about the complex problem of unemployment. Every credible economist knows that the best way to tackle unemployment is with a policy strategy based on a dynamic mix of stronger, productivity-based economic growth; education, skills and training; and an appropriate degree of ﬂexibility in workplace conditions. The Work for the Dole scheme does not

touch on any of these vital inputs to create jobs and lower unemployment, with the possible exception being the small inﬂuence of forcing people to gain the most basic of skills from doing something in an unpaid placement while they are still looking for a wage-paying job. For a government that prides itself on reducing red tape, the proposed scheme will lead to an explosion of compliance, regulation and meaningless correspondence. Who, for example, is going to monitor the job application explosion? Who is going to receive the job applications and work through them? (Certainly business is outraged at the prospect of having to deal with what will inevitably be millions of job applications per month for something like 180,000 job vacancies Australia wide.) Then there are some other facts, which make the scheme laughable and cringeworthy, even to a well-meaning Year 12 economics student. There are currently around 700,000 to 750,000 unemployed people and a further 500,000 people not in the labour force who would like paid work if a job opportunity emerged. This totals around 1.2 million people currently not in work who, by deﬁnition, are the potential supply of new labour into the economy as it grows and develops.

The best decision you’ll ever make.

The framing of the work for the dole scheme fails on another test, and that is its failure to outline its objectives. Why is the government even considering such a scheme? How much will it add to employment while reducing the unemployment rate?

A market failure occurs when people miss out on the opportunity to maximise their knowledge, skills and education and, therefore, their income earning potential which is their potential contribution to a nation’s economy. This is why there is a vital role for government in ﬁnancing access to education, skills and training. Well-crafted education and skills policy will, in time, do more to address the issue of job creation and unemployment than a cornball Work for the Dole scheme.

Then there is the overarching shortcoming of the scheme that fails to deal with the issue of creating jobs that are worth doing, with a fair and decent wage paid for that job.

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It’s called an Advance Care Directive and it is an important step forward in planning for health care.

To find out more or to download the free Advance Care Directive Guide, visit advancecaredirectives.sa.gov.au

to address. Getting workers, those currently unemployed and those wanting to be in a salary-paying job, to have the skills that are needed as the economy continues to grow.

It is not even clear more jobs and lower unemployment are the objectives of the scheme, let alone whether the scheme aims to get 500,000 extra people into work or get the unemployment rate down to four percent or less.

The thought of losing the ability to make your own decisions is a scary one. But there is a way for you to have a voice, no matter what happens.

Quick and easy to complete, the Advance Care Directive allows you to: • write down your wishes, preferences and instructions for your future health care, end of life, living arrangements and personal matters; and/or • appoint one or more Substitute Decision-Makers to make these decisions on your behalf if you are unable to make them for yourself.

In other words, there are 1.2 million people competing for 180,000 job vacancies and that does not include people already in a job who are applying for a different role.

Instead of fluffing around with the red tape frenzy that is a Work for the Dole scheme, the government should be knuckling down to set the economy on a medium- to long-run path of stronger, productivity-based growth. This is where a skilled and educated population is the absolute bedrock of getting unemployment down. In straightforward economic terms, when the economy grows, firms need easy access to suitable workers. The last time Australia recorded a strong growth upswing, many firms were lamenting the fact that there were insufficient workers to allow them to invest and expand. The socalled skills shortage or capacity constraint in business acted as a handbrake on the economy even though there were still around 500,000 unemployed and about the same number underemployed. This is what labour market reform needs

This is the policy path that has not only been overlooked by the current government, but has been actively discouraged through cuts to education funding, a slap dash approach to training and the move to a high fee based structure for university places. While this article will long be forgotten in a decade or so, there is a risk that the current policy approach of the government will erode the skill set of the workforce with the Work for the Dole scheme a non-adhesive Band-Aid for a much larger issue of unemployment. It would be most disappointing to see a skills shortage and a structural increase in the unemployment rate due to this dumbing down of the workforce and if the work for the dole scheme comes to pass and is in place for any length of time, it could be the watershed for such an outcome.

» Stephen Koukoulas is the Managing Director of Market Economics thekouk.com

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014 11

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WORK FOR THE DOLE

A Myopic Policy Failure?

to industry development projects. With no career pathway in sight, engagement in Work for the Dole can prove to be soul destroying for participants, adding to the already heavy emotional burden of being unemployed. Perversely, Work for the Dole entrenches a class of low-paid workers in government and cash strapped NGOs where most placements will be based. This has the potential to create corrosive conﬂict in workplaces where Work for the Dole placements are used to replace paid employees and ﬁll holes in service delivery created by budget cuts.

BY JOHN SPOEHR

t is a tragedy that Work for the Dole has become the centerpiece of the Australian Government’s employment policy. The program ﬂies in the face of decades of accumulated evidence about what constitutes effective labour market programs and the necessity that they be accompanied by a jobs generation strategy. At a time when we urgently need a sophisticated and effective national employment strategy, the Abbott Government is expanding a proven policy failure – Work for the Dole. As it does so, it is also cutting funding for vocational training in South Australia by around 23 percent over the next three years. Work for the Dole parks participants in workplaces without guaranteed access to a suite of education, training and personal support services. It is a poor substitute for engagement in well-resourced labour market programs linked

Work for the Dole is set to expand enormously as a consequence of the Federal Budget. Under the new Work for the Dole regime, young people aged between 18 and 30 are required to spend 25 hours per week in a workplace to secure their income support. Incredibly, you must now lodge up to 40 job applications per month or risk losing some or all of your income support. From January 2015 you will have to wait six months before you can apply for Youth Allowance or Newstart. Yes, you have to live without any income support! This is brutal, particularly when net job growth threatens to stall and youth unemployment remains chronically high in many parts of South Australia. There are simply not enough jobs available for qualiﬁed young people let alone those without qualiﬁcations. Work for the Dole is no solution for those experiencing multiple disadvantage, homelessness, abuse or drug dependency.

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It is astoundingly harsh to make young unemployed people wait six months to receive income support. The consequences of this will be horrendous. Denying thousands of young people access to financial support will inevitably lead to rising homelessness and desperate financial hardship. It will place additional pressure on poor families and households experiencing intergenerational unemployment. Those young people in private rental accommodation will bear the brunt of the draconian measures first. Many will be forced into homelessness and others into unsafe and over-crowded homes. Where financial hardship prevails, a rise in theft can be expected to follow. In South Australia alone, there are around 32,000 people receiving Newstart or Youth Allowance. Many of these people are vulnerable to greater hardship as they face the harsh measures now being imposed on them. All of this at a time when South Australia is facing a jobs crisis generated by the collapse of manufacturing employment over the last decade and the closure of the automotive industry. Policymakers in Australia should never have seriously considered Work for the Dole as a solution. Self-respecting nations should not blame their citizens for circumstances they have no control over. A compassionate society should not stigmatise those who are unemployed by consigning them to a program

that is punitive, demeaning and ineffective. As a measure of our compassion as a society, Work for the Dole is an abject failure, a monument to mean-spirited and misguided policy. At a more fundamental level, Work for the Dole is emblematic of a radical neo-conservative policy program that seeks to dismantle the Australian post war social settlement that many see as the essence of the fair go. The fair go embodies universal access to healthcare, education and housing, regardless of your income. It means striving for full employment, decent and equitable incomes. It recognises that those who are unemployed are commonly so because of economic circumstances outside their control. Work for the Dole reinforces a view diametrically opposed to this – that those who are unemployed must bear much of the responsibility for the circumstances they ﬁnd themselves in. The unemployed, rather than unemployment, are the central focus of this myopic policy. Work for the Dole is the antithesis of the fair go. It needs to be cast aside and replaced by a sophisticated, compassionate and effective response to unemployment in the 21st century. A national jobs and industry development summit is needed to kick this along.

@JohnSpoehr

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12 The Adelaide Review September 2014

Opinion MONTEFIORE Ways to surmount Adelaide’s economic funk are subject to some revealing observations buried in a detailed review, but how many South Australians have even read it? BY Sir Montefiore Scuttlebutt

ast month’s State Government blueprint for kick-starting South Australia was notable for many things, but the most obvious was how it came and went in the public sphere so quickly. At least it gave the everhungry Fourth Estate something to chew on for a few days, and presented the illusion that our Premier was still confidently captaining the ship of state. All will be well if only business would commit to more risk. Contrast this with a story buried in Town Hall documents a few months ago that didn’t attract the same media interest. Comprising 47 reflective pages, it laid bare Adelaide’s tortured soul, revealing all of its vulnerabilities, its conservative family characteristics, and its economic frailties at a time when the world’s social and economic sprinters have left us far behind. Then it highlighted our existing capacities – not

requiring summits or grand gestures – but how we might build on what we have. The report summarised a November 2013 study titled Attracting the people we need and a January 2014 report Attracting the business that we need, created by a relatively recent group called the Committee for Adelaide (C for A). It had been released in time for several chattering months leading up to the state poll. However, neither report appears to have prompted either of the traditional parties (or the other political splinter groups that

claim ‘alternative’ policies) to recommend wide reading to stimulate voters’ thinking, or reframe policy makers’ proposals should they secure government for the 2014–18 term. The fascinating aspect of all of this is that despite the passing of many state government terms into history, with scores of ministers and their highly paid advisors drawing literally millions annually from the public purse, the C for A’s enlightening reports were created by a not-for-profit, non-partisan, apparently apolitical group of imaginative, youngish Adelaide thinkers within six months of their first meeting just over one year ago. Search Google to read the names and profiles of the committee of 13: all are clever achievers. Anyway, an election came and went, and all we saw from both sides was a repeat appeal to the tribalism that characterises South Australian politics, as well as models that proposed government-as-family-patriarch: the initiator and final source of all Adelaide solutions. So misleading is this model (in that part of Adelaide and suburbs that isn’t fixated on public sector payrolls, flexitime and RDOs), it’s worth looking at those two reports again. Space being tight, it’s only possible to reproduce a small slice of the wisdom, distilling some thought-provoking core proposals contained in a third document, Earning our place in a global economy. They include: 1. Grow the number of publicly listed companies headquartered in Adelaide. 2. Sustain and grow our family-run businesses that employ 55 percent of our private sector workforce. 3. Turbo-charge our technology-driven, microenterprise sector where 66 percent of our new jobs come from. (Much detail explains these three points, and it’s illuminating to read, especially if you’ve lived in Adelaide for a long time, aren’t an academic in an economics faculty, and don’t have the perspective of those who see what is patently obvious to visitors who examine our economic fabric from a distance.) Having established these three core recommendations, the report reflects on one case study of another economy that managed change. “Ireland’s success in attracting high profile global knowledge-based industries to Dublin has been attributed to generous financial incentives; specifically designed to appeal to R&D [Research and Development]intensive enterprise. They include a 25

percent R&D tax credit, designed to encourage companies to undertake new or additional R&D activity there; incentives to generate qualifying patents of up to five million euros of annual qualifying income exempted from tax, and a maximum corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent on all corporate trading profits generated by R&D activities.” “Adelaide can’t and shouldn’t get into a beauty contest to attract businesses here on unsustainable subsidies. But we can compete through a combination of financial and non-financial incentives.” (These include natural and cultural amenities.) Regrettably, however, we carry a significant, self-imposed handicap. “Adelaide was rated fifth in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2013 Global Liveability Index. However, when Mercer rated Adelaide’s infrastructure, measuring energy and water provisions, telephone, mail, public transportation, traffic congestion and airport effectiveness, Adelaide was placed 37th. We must do better.” Twelve years of the same tribe controlling state purse strings highlights what happens when a weak opposition fidgets as government ministers put off most bigpicture decisions, term after term, in favour of short-term gratification, often in marginal electorates, aimed at pleasing voters at the rapidly approaching next poll. If Adelaide is okay on the natural and the cultural amenities, that leaves unaddressed the infrastructure challenges (which our parliamentarians knew all about 12 years ago) – and the financial incentives. Adelaide’s need for those prompts thoughts about that dreaded word tax, and that even more dreaded word following the federal budget – Canberra. And, right now, with a state Labor administration already warring with a Liberal federal administration on myriad fronts, Adelaide’s task, since the March 2014 poll result, just got harder. It seemed relatively easier only few months before, when nine men and four women compared notes and came up with one of the more practicable presentations for South Australian survival seen in a long time. But remember – sound ideas can survive tax ice ages. Google: Committee for Adelaide.

The Adelaide Review September 2014 13

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OPINION

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microbe for Oregon in the United States. S. pastorianus is commonly utilised for lager beers. The Carlsberg Laboratory, founded by the Carlsberg Brewery in 1875, has made, and continues to make, major contributions to biochemistry and biotechnology (but we’re leaving that arena for Nick).

More Beer & Civilisation – Biotechnology’s Debt to Beer BY Stephen Forbes

To understand the sophistication of our relationship with plants, you should sign up for Professor Mabberley’s course and endeavour to try the Botanic Ale that’s currently being brewed from the Adelaide Botanic Garden barley crop. The support of Coopers and Lobethal Bierhaus has made Botanic Ale possible – so if you can’t get Botanic Ale, their beers will more than suffice. You just have to think about the series of genetic miracles and the sophisticated craft that make them possible.

ater this spring, Professor David Mabberley, the authority behind botanical bible Mabberley’s Plant Book, is running a two-day short course linked to the Santos Museum of Economic Botany in Adelaide Botanic Garden. The topic is Economic Botany Today: A study of practical ecological biochemistry for humans. The topic is hardly an esoteric one; as we take our daily close encounters with the plant kingdom for granted, you might miss the basic premise. Plants harvest sunlight and utilise the harvested chemical energy to metabolise the substrates of our food, textiles, medicines, drugs, dyes, pesticides and perfumes. The exploration of this relationship is a rich field and Mabberley one of the world’s great guides. While photosynthesis and plant biochemistry provide the foundations, human manipulation of these biochemicals demonstrates remarkable ingenuity. Perhaps the outstanding exemplar to explore the astonishing sophistication of our manipulation is beer. Beer’s ingredients are simple – water, barley, hops and yeast. Indeed, in Germany, a beer purity law dating from 1516, Reinheitsgebot, requires beer to be made only from water, malt and hops. The rider to this is the recognition of yeast – an essential ingredient in beer-making utilised effectively but unknown 500 years ago. The finessing of beer production over the past 500 years illustrates some remarkable advances in biotechnology. Nick Sterenberg, Coopers’ operations manager, argues that beer has actually driven advances in biotechnology, especially over the past century – and there’s strong evidence behind Sterenberg’s claim. (I’ll see if I can get Nick to guest in this column – or maybe even better, for me, to ghost!)

The first step in beer making is selecting and growing the grain. Adelaide Botanic Garden’s Navigator barley crop represented the talents of barley breeder Jason Eglinton (University of Adelaide’s Waite Campus) and Rob Wheeler (SARDI) in sowing, growing and harvesting. Barley, Hordeum vulgare, is singularly fashioned for brewing – strains such as Navigator take that fashioning to a molecular level. Barley has three layers of aleurone cells underneath the seed coat (wheat and maize have only one) – the aleurone layer plays an active role in germination. This contributes to rapid germination and facilitates synchronous malting and to the breakdown of cell walls. The Gardens’ barley was malted by Joe White Maltings – a generous favour as our quantity was too small for commercial malting and too large for the lab bench. The high temperatures required for kilning to stop germination to complete the malting process, and required

again for the mashing process, mean that the amylases (the enzymes that break down the starch in the seed endosperm into sugars) must be heat tolerant. Remarkably, barley amylases survive kilning and mashing to break down starch into sugars – a critical step in brewing. Further, while the barley protein content must be low for decent beer, there needs to be just enough protein to support colour and foam, and to feed the yeast. So far, we’ve selected and grown a malting barley, and malted and mashed the grain to prepare the wort – a sugar-rich substance whose flavours are essentially derived from a very sophisticated manipulation of barley. The wort is sterilised and the remaining enzymes inactivated by boiling. At this stage, hops are added for flavour, bitterness and aroma, and as a preservative. While ale and beer are now largely synonymous, historically beer was ale made with hops – the superiority of hops to alternative bitter herbs for both taste and preserving beer has been apparent since at least the 1516 Reinheitsgebot. So superior that I’m not even going to discuss the alternatives. Botanically, hops, Humulus lupulus, are exceptional. Hops are dioecious – with separate male and female plants; only the latter produce the catkins (‘hop cones’) that are utilised in brewing. In spring, the roots of the hops send up bines around a support commonly trellised up to eight metres. Bines are climbing plants that grow by extending as a helix, contrasting with vines that utilise tendrils or suckers. Hop bines insist on wrapping clockwise. The plants themselves used to be grown in the Adelaide Hills (Lobethal Bierhaus’s Alistair Turnbull lives in a retired oast house near his brewery). Today commercial hop production in Australia is restricted to Tasmania and north east Victoria. Harvest requires the bines to be pulled down and the flowers dried and then pressed (take a look at the Horst Ranch hop films from the 1900s sacramentohistory. org/films_hopfarm.html to illustrate the mechanisation of this process). Hops contain over 250 named compounds including oils

such as the yellowish waxy oleoresin lupulin that give flavour and aroma, and the antibiotic priorities that suppress bacteria and favour brewer’s yeast. The final stage of beer making is the introduction of brewer’s yeast for fermenting – converting carbohydrates to alcohol and carbon dioxide. The yeast is commonly Saccharomyces cerevisiae – the official state

»»Prof David Mabberley’s Economic Botany Today October 27 and 28 Adelaide Botanic Garden environment.sa.gov.au/botanicgardens/ Whats_on/News_Events_Listing/ economic_botany_today »»Stephen Forbes, Director, Botanic Gardens of Adelaide @StephenJForbes

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14 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

COLUMNISTS IRREGULAR WRITINGS

Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith.

Neighbours – A Rough Primer BY DAVE GRANEY

f Neighbours dropped off your radar at some point, the nearest reference point to tune in again would be the fact that there is a character called Daniel (played by Adelaide actor Tim Phillips), who is the adult son of the characters Scott (Jason Donovan) and Charlene (Kylie Minogue). He lives in a luxury hotel called Lassiter’s with his uncle Paul Robinson (Stefan Dennis). Daniel is in a relationship with the quite stunning Amber, who cheated on her boyfriend Josh to be with him. Josh’s parents are Brad and Terese (Paul’s sister). They are neighbours with Amber’s parents Lauren and Matt. A major plot point of recent months has been the fact that Brad and Lauren had a child together before they each got married to their respective partners. They had been told the child was stillborn but learned that was untrue. The now adult child, Paige Novak, had also drifted into Ramsay Street and eventually the news burst out like a hot pimple exploding over the street. The players in the drama are all crawling from the wreckage at the moment.

Neighbours pumps out ﬁve half-hour episodes a week and is broadcast on Eleven – the digital outlet for Channel Ten’s ‘off Broadway’ stuff. It goes out against all the other commercial channels’ current affairs and news shows. It is still shown all around the world and is undoubtedly one of Australian television’s most successful shows. It has a website and a Facebook page where plot teasers are given out and actors’ interviews are available. Previous episodes can also be accessed. They use Twitter very effectively, ending each segment of the show, as it goes to an ad break, with a hashtag question for viewers to respond to. The tweets are full of interest and emotion and are often quite hilarious. The show is ﬁlmed in what was – or what is left of – the Channel Ten studios in Nunawading. The major set pieces are the luxury resort/Hotel Lassiter’s, the café (started by Harold), the various

houses, the garage and the high school. Exteriors are shot at a nearby cul-de-sac, which has busloads of UK tourists regularly driving through and stopping for photos. (The bus hilariously stops at a service station where Neighbours memorabilia is kept in a storage cage and the tourists can take home a bit of Ramsay street.) Stefan Dennis has been in the show for what must be the longest time. All his adult life? His character Paul Robinson suffered a leg injury in the early 2000s in a bomb explosion. He was involved in a murder (still undiscovered?) and, at the moment, is in severe depression as a result of the shooting of his niece Kate at her wedding in the park. Susan and Karl Kennedy are also long time residents of Ramsay Street. Karl has the distinction of being the only entertainment ﬁgure to be given a positive mention in Mark E Smith, from The Fall’s, book, Renegade: The

I must come clean to the fact that I appeared, as myself, in two episodes of Neighbours in 1998. I ﬂirted with Susan and beat up Toadie. Then drove off in my MG. Toadie, played by Ryan Moloney, apparently started as a runner for the show and has also spent his entire adult life on the street. Toadie is now a lawyer and married, after several false starts, to Sonya. (Sonya has a murky history of drug and/or gambling addiction, which is always threatening to bubble to the surface again.) The vampish Naomi, who only seems to like married men, has tested their relationship. (Much to the disdain of her mother, Sheila, played by Colette Mann.) Though she has just, as I write, boffed young Josh in the lift at Lassiter’s. Other characters include Kyle (pronounced Koil) and his partner, the country blow-in, Georgia; Chris the gay mechanic, Brennan the ex-cop and widower to Kate, and the younger set of Callum, Bailey and Imogen. Neighbours runs a tight ship and two or three story lines weave in and out each week. Characters appear consecutive nights and then may go back to the bench for a spell. Consider this a primer to a long running show. As British comic Max Miller was wont to say, of himself, “There’ll never be another…”

@davegraney

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THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014 15

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COLUMNISTS

THIRD AGE How to Make a Nation Unhappy BY SHIRLEY STOTT DESPOJA

he world has moved on since June 11… a couple of new moons, new threats, disasters and fears. And so have the jokes and indignation expressed at this present government’s expense. But I am stuck like an old gramophone needle replaying the phrase I ﬁrst heard that day which to me represents a horrendous dichotomy that could damage our spirit. Lifters and leaners. “Reward the lifters and discourage the leaners.” What a miserable way to speak of a nation and its people. Since it and its variations were uttered, and included in the Budget speech, I reckon most people who heard them have had queasy feelings of uncertainty – especially old people – about which category we fall under. And that is sad. I repudiate the notion that we are a nation of leaners and lifters. But I know that I am not the only person feeling down in the dumps for having heard it. It is rubbish, of course; a nasty little dogma that has had its day. Yet it causes pain and shame

to good people. It is a vicious, false dichotomy that might yet have the power to divide a nation. The truth is that we are all both leaners and lifters. Graeme Innes pointed this out beautifully in his last speech as Disability Discrimination Commissioner at the National Press Club. In the course of one day ordinary people switch from one to another: helping, being helped. And there is no shame in it. But Innes called its latest use “facile”, a “Ming Dynasty phrase which has lately gained currency”: a clever reference to Sir Robert Menzies’ use of the same description. Menzies almost certainly borrowed it, not from some great philosopher or economist, but from a half-baked 19th century US pop poet called Ella Wheeler Wilcox who wrote the asinine rhyming stanzas called Two Kinds of People. She opined: “There is only one lifter to twenty who lean.” Now how did she work that out? Can I see the maths? No doubt it came to her between writing poems such as A Maiden to Her Mirror and A Maiden’s Secret, not to mention waiting for her dead husband to send her a message. She was big on that sort of thing. She believed in all kinds of spooky, sentimental stuff. She belongs in the Poets’ Naughty Corner. But she does resonate with our times in one “poem” she wrote, called I Like Cigars Beneath the Stars, which was set to music. I kid you not.

So that’s where Sir Robert Menzies and our present Treasurer got their inspiration for characterising Australians as leaners and lifters. Makes your heart glad. Margaret Thatcher, too, favoured Wilcox, and quoted her (vomitous) The Winds of Fate in a radio interview in the ‘90s: “’Tis the set of the soul/that decides its goal,/And not the calm or the strife.” No doubt that helped change the course of Britain. We are a united country with pride in ourselves for good reasons. No one talks about leaners and lifters when there’s a ﬂood or a bushﬁre. Community is about helping and being helped. No shame in either. Don’t muck it up. Reward the lifters and encourage, not discourage, the less able. Don’t give currency to terms that make neighbours look sideways at each other. And ditch Ella Wheeler Bloody Wilcox.

selling my house, that it would be “good for my (that is, her) soul” and make her “feel good” to help me move onto the next chapter of my life. She declared this to my letterbox via someone doing a leaﬂet drop and will never know me or my house. Is that unrequited passion these days?

********** I miss language restraint. When we were young, things were nice or very nice or we found an exact word for them. Now everything is fabulous, incredible and amazing – I see “amazeballs” was given a dictionary tick last month – and people don’t know where to go when they really need to impress. People used to have interests and hobbies. Now they have passions. Last month, a real estate seller declared that she was “passionate” about

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For some reason, this brought a remembrance of tired insurance salesmen of the ‘50s, in their grey hats, and wrinkled suits, knocking on doors and asking quietly for a few minutes of madam’s time. No idea then of asking madam to be good for his soul or to serve his passion. Though I dare say that that was just what sometimes, they did.

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16 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

FASHION Creating 11 costumes for the opening night with three distinctive Ediacaran-inspired looks for the dancers, Rawlinson played with the idea of ﬁrst lifeforms and otherness in the designs. “These costumes focused on delicate and ethereal choreography, mimicking that of the creatures from the Ediacaran period. We came up with a design that accentuated the dancers’ movements and presented them in an other-worldly light.”

Finding inspiration in things like shape, composition, colour and movement, spills far outside the usual world of fashion for Rawlinson. “Dance photography was a huge inspiration to me on this project. Photographer Lois Greenﬁeld became my muse.”

iven the ever-evolving connection between fashion and art, an opportunity to collaborate with the South Australian Museum on the opening night of the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize was not one to pass up in the eyes of Alice Rawlinson.

It was easy for Rawlinson to draw inspiration from the theme. “The more ﬂuid elements of the costumes came from the idea of movement, as creatures of the Ediacaran period were some of the ﬁrst moving organisms,” she explains. “Fabric choice and garment construction were both key to helping the ideas and inspirations translate. Using stretch fabrics allowed the garments to be manipulated to form creases that resembled patterns of the fossils.”

Deni Jones of Cul-de-sac, who was styling the event, approached Rawlinson, as the pair had worked together on a few projects over the years. “She approached me with ideas she envisioned would bring the event alive and transform the museum for the night. I’ve

Rawlinson worked closely with choreographer Tanya Vogues in the lead up to the event. “It was the way that the costumes were worn by the dancers and manipulated on the night as part of the performance that really turned them into works of art. The fabric was

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Rawlinson sees the convergence of art, nature and fashion as a ﬂuid one. “There was a sentiment shared on the night that I found really beautiful and think it perfectly sums up the relationship between nature and art, and fashion as an extension of art,” she explains. “The idea was that so much art and beauty already exists in nature, therefore, using it as an inspiration for our own artistic creations is a great way to interpret our connection with it.”

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the focal point of these costumes. The drape and metallic appearance of the garments paired with the strong, yet intimate, choreography created a sense of ﬂuidity and weightlessness.”

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worked with Jones on a number of creative projects, and as she knew my background in design and love for costume and dance, it was a perfect match and obvious collaboration.”

The Adelaide Review September 2014 17

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BOOKS However, with sinister significance, Heather is referred to in the novel’s opening sentence as “the fifth woman”. The men were serial rapists and killers and the compulsion is always lurking.

John Sandford / Simon & Schuster UK

BY Roger Hainsworth

A blonde waitress, Heather, is abducted from the dark area behind a Minnesota roadside diner as she is taking trash to the dumpster. Her ankles are taped. Her head and torso are buried inside an old mailbag and she is dumped on the bunk behind a truck driver, the abductor’s accomplice. The bag holds her hands to her sides with only restricted movement. The man who seized her is driving his own vehicle a little way back. Foolproof? Not hardly. Heather has always been scared of that dark area late at night and she carries a very sharp folding knife. Sharp enough to cut herself free and then stab her mortal enemy through the neck and in the spine. The truck swerves into the ditch, rolls and the follower arrives to find his friend in desperate case with multiple stab wounds. Heather has escaped toward the lights of a neighbouring farm. If the abductor had just driven on and left him for the cops, many lives might have been spared and not only female victims like Heather.

Sandford is at his cracking best with his wonderful sense of place for the midwest’s small towns; his vivid evocations of police investigations under pressure. Above all, there is that other Sandford dimension: we watch the internal world and external activities of the killer as we do the police. Not for the squeamish but this 24th Davenport novel is as good as its predecessors. How does he do it?

AMCHAM IINET BUSINESS LUNCHEON

BY Jillian Schedneck

In her memoir, Joanna Rakoff delivers a charming account of the year she spent working for the New York literary agency that represented author JD Salinger. Her first ‘real job’ at 23, Rakoff finds herself stepping back in time. The year was 1996; Rakoff uses a Selectric typewriter and Dictaphone to transcribe letters from her boss, who refers to photocopies as ‘carbons’. Much of her workday is spent reading fan letters addressed to Salinger. Never having read his work herself, she begins to understand the impact of his writing on readers of all ages, from teens encountering Catcher in the Rye for the first time to older veterans re-reading Nine Stories. Following the rules, Rakoff mainly replies with a form letter stating that Mr Salinger does not wish to be contacted. Yet several times, she feels compelled to provide a

Rakoff’s writing is often lyrical and funny, her descriptions apt and precise. The story itself, though, is not very large. She is on the very periphery of Salinger’s life, speaking to him on the phone several times and meeting him only once. She hadn’t even read his works until nearly the end of her year working for the agency. Much of the story involves intrigue over a deal that never eventuates. There are long passages describing her walking through the Waldorf Astoria or Central Park. These scenes hint at some larger consequence that also never comes to be. In the ending, the conditions of her current life, particularly her love life, are left muddled, and she leaves many pertinent questions unanswered. There are many beautiful moments in My Salinger Year that truly capture the romance of being young in New York City, of striving, of being poor, of figuring out one’s life. For anyone interested in recent literary history, or book publishing from the point of view of an ingénue, this will be an enjoyable read.

Nigel Starck and Sir Anthony Trollope, 17th Baronet The First Celebrity: Anthony Trollope’s Australasian Odyssey

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In the 1870s novelist Anthony Trollope became the first celebrity to tour Australasia. To mark the bicentenary of his birth, author Nigel Starck and Sir Anthony Trollope, 17th Baronet (Anthony Trollope’s great-greatgrandson) will launch The First Celebrity: Anthony Trollope’s Australasian Odyssey. Copies will be available for purchase.

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Ian Macfarlane holds SA’s future in his hands as the Federal Minister responsible for resources and energy; automation and manufacturing; science; skills and training. THE ADELAIDE

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Joanna Rakoff / Bloomsbury

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My Salinger Year

Rakoff captures the rush and joy of young womanhood, as well as its uncertainties. She excels at depicting her youthful, clueless self, baffled by her boss and terrified when Salinger actually rings her. She is also uncertain about larger questions: who are her friends? Does she want to become a literary agent or a writer herself? Why did she give up one of the most important relationships of her life? Rakoff still loves her college boyfriend, who moved to California, and yet is living with Don, an overbearing communist writer some years her senior. She chooses to remain very close to the story, not giving us her mature reflections on these relationships, but instead highlighting her passitivity. Don is clearly not a good boyfriend, and her contempt for him is unveiled. Yet Rakoff does not chide her former self, but lets the story play out as she gradually gains confidence and poise.

REVIEW

Date: Thursday 25 September Time: 6pm for 6:30pm Venue: Ira Raymond Exhibition Room Bookings by Tuesday 23 September to: robina.weir@adelaide.edu.au Telephone: 8313 4064 Open to the public, $5 admission at the door Sponsors: Unibooks, NTEU and Coriole Wines

2221-2

Field of Prey

So begins Field of Prey, John Sandford’s latest novel featuring that fascinating, hard-grafting yet often intuitive detective, Lucas Davenport. He is a lateral-thinking man. So much so that in his spare time he designs complex computer games and then computer simulations of crimes to train detectives. When he sold his parttime computer business he made a fortune – and the royalties still earn him a steady income. Davenport is, therefore, not your average cop. A former Minneapolis detective, for some time he has been part of an investigative organisation formed by the governor of Minnesota to operate across police jurisdictions. Years after Heather’s experience, a young couple report they have been driven from an obscure rural site by an appalling smell. The police discover what they begin calling “the Black Hole”. That organisation and Davenport in particular are soon badly needed. More than a score of female bodies come out of the Hole. Some were women who disappeared years ago; others were more recent. Davenport is appalled that so many women could disappear without the police suspecting what is going on. Then another local woman disappears. Soon after a senior investigator, a good detective but poor at street craft, follows a faint but promising lead. His dead body, abandoned in a small town cemetery shows how promising it was, but he had not followed the basic rules. Never go alone. Always report in.

personal reply, to enlightening and humorous consequences. Throughout her year at the agency, Rakoff conveys the simple thrills of being surrounded by shelves of revered classics and the surprising delight of discovering new literary talent.

18 The Adelaide Review September 2014

WIN / PERFORMING ARTS WIN! FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN, ENTER YOUR DETAILS AT ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

Night Moves Selected cinemas from Thursday, September 11 Three radical environmentalists look to execute the protest of their lives: the explosion of a hydroelectric dam. Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Stars Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard.

Hollywood and Disney Hits to Pops Capri Theatre, 141 Goodwood Road Sunday, September 14, 2pm The Theatre Organ Society SA presents Rob Richards (USA) playing the Wurlitzer pipe organ and Alex Zsolt (USA) playing the Kawai grand piano. Richards, house organist at Disney’s El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, and Zsolt, a Gospel pianist, will play solo and duet items.

The Skeleton Twins Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas Advance screenings Friday, September 19 to Sunday, September 21 After 10 years of estrangement, twins Maggie and Milo coincidentally cheat death on the same day, prompting them to reunite and confront how their lives went so wrong. Directed by Craig Johnson. Stars Kristen Wiig, Ty Burrell and Bill Hader.

Northern Lights, Maestro Series 3 Elder Hall Sunday, September 21, 6.30pm Adelaide Youth Orchestra finishes 2014 with a night of northern-inspired music; Sibelius with his Symphony No 2, Rachmaninov and South Australian John Polglase’s Lux Nova. Lauded young pianist Mekhla Kumar returns to Adelaide to perform Rachmaninov’s everpopular, Piano Concerto No 2.

Hammered: A Shimmer Event Rosemount Estate Cellar Door, Chaffeys Road, McLaren Vale Friday, September 26, 6.30pm Join guest speaker David Sefton Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival, and acclaimed photographer Robert McFarlane as they auction a classic photograph encapsulating a moment in the history of the Adelaide Festival, with sublime sounds provided by Monsieur Swing. Proceeds of the auction will be awarded to the creator of the most popular exhibition in the current Shimmer Photographic Biennale.

Tan Dun: Nu Shu The Secret Songs of Women Presented by Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra Adelaide Festival Theatre Saturday, September 27, 8pm World-renowned composer and conductor Tan Dun returns to the OzAsia Festival following his Australian Premiere of the Martial Arts Trilogy in 2012 joined again by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. His latest offering, Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women is a dramatic, 13 movement symphony and documentary micro films bring to life the ancient, secret language Nu Shu, shared only by women in the remote area of Tan’s home province of Hunan, China.

The Suit State Theatre Company of South Australia Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre Thursday, October 2, 8pm Revenge is a dish best served cold, but it’s also one that can eat you alive — and the people you love. Fresh from sell-out performances worldwide, legendary director Peter Brook’s production The Suit visits Adelaide in an Australian exclusive this October.

Ludwig and Feasting With Wild Animals

With Beethoven Fest, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra will celebrate the “David Bowie of his time”. by Graham Strahle

The Blue Ball Palais Ballroom, The Esplanade Semaphore Friday, October 3, 8pm The funky-but-chic Blue Ball officially opens the Semaphore Music Festival with The Dirty Roots featuring Snooks La Vie performing live. Dress up, wig out, wear masks, inappropriate sequins, op shop treasures, you get the drift. Proudly supporting Beyond Blue.

Borodin Quartet Musica Viva Adelaide Town Hall Thursday, October 9, 7.30pm The legendary Borodin Quartet is living musical history, and their traditions carry a unique impact that makes every concert glow with the authenticity of experience and knowledge. Hear them in a wonderful program of Beethoven, Shostakovich and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.

he popular image of Beethoven might be that of a boorish peasant who knocked over Europe’s musical establishment with a kind of clumsy, arrogant genius. Even his acolyte and piano student Ferdinand Ries said as much: “Beethoven was most awkward and bungling in his behaviour… No piece of furniture was safe from him.” But Beethoven the klutz is not an image Nicholas McGegan, the British conductor and early music authority, agrees with. Rather, he regards the German composer as a radical progressive who took music in new directions that broke all the rules. “Beethoven was a David Bowie of his time. His music went to places people didn’t know,” says McGegan, who leads the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming two-week Beethoven Fest. “He was constantly bashing pianos and trying to extend their range, and his concerts often went on for six hours. He had no idea of how long his pieces would go, and performances were unrehearsed. He gave every reason why he shouldn’t have succeeded. He was an enfant terrible of his day, but people could see that his music was fantastic.” Beethoven’s concerts tended to be wild events compared with what we are used to

today, says McGegan. He cites one Viennese concert in 1808 in which Beethoven premiered no less than two symphonies (the Fifth and Sixth), the Choral Fantasia, the Fourth Piano Concerto, plus several movements from a new mass. “Audiences never knew what was going to happen next,” he says. “The Fourth was the last concerto that Beethoven played himself; it’s the one that begins with a piano solo instead of the usual orchestral introduction. When he’d finished the solo and was bringing the orchestra in, he leapt up and knocked over a candle a boy was holding. His concerts were hazardous, rough and tumble events. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘It’s like feasting with wild animals’.” The fifth of the ASO’s composer festivals since its Brahms Cycle in 2000, September’s Beethoven Fest will be different in a number of ways. There won’t be a marathon of all his symphonies; instead it’s a case of expect the unexpected. Two of his least performed symphonies, Nos 1 and 8, are paired with his first and last piano concertos, Nos 1 and 5 (‘Emperor’). There’s a concert of Beethoven’s chamber music in the State Library and a screening of the forensic documentary Beethoven’s Hair (2005) that investigates how he may have succumbed to lead poisoning.

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in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the Town Hall – although this first requires registration. If all that sounds a bit circus-like, the appearance of two of today’s leading pianists in Beethoven Fest – Stephen Hough and Robert Levin – promises to restore decorum. Or maybe it won’t. Both are highly regarded risk-takers

BO O K

N O W

Most attention-grabbing will be ‘Conduct Your Own Orchestra’ in which members of the public can wield the baton in front of the ASO when it plays in the Adelaide Railway Station Concourse – McGegan, as the ASO’s new Artist-in-Association, will deftly step aside for that one. Then there’s ‘Open Haus’ in which participants can play amongst the ASO

Robert Levin

photo: Ascherman Rayfield

Stephen Hough

Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke

Nicholas McGegan

photo: Randy Beach

PERFORMING ARTS when it comes to Beethoven. Levin, renowned for his creative flair, explains what he will do in Piano Concerto No. 1: “I play along with the orchestra in the tutti section, I improvise embellishments (especially in the 2nd and 3rd movements) and I improvise my cadenzas.” This is exactly the kind of thing Beethoven did. Says McGegan: “It wows an audience. It’s like being a trapeze artist without the net.” To make matters more interesting, they will be using a new edition for this concerto. Says Levin: “Jonathan Del Mar has been preparing exemplary new editions of Beethoven’s works for Bärenreiter – exhaustively researched, with detailed and informative commentary. The results of his efforts include significant changes in the musical text and details of articulation and dynamics.” McGegan will also be using the new Bärenreiter edition of the First Symphony. It eliminates many errors that have crept in since Beethoven published it in 1801 – there’s no surviving autograph to rely upon. “Beethoven wasn’t a good proof reader and people have discovered a lot of mistakes,” says McGegan. “I’m also keen on preserving Beethoven’s metronome markings. The slow movement of quaver equals 120 is actually quite fast. In the old Klemperer days they played it more stodgily, and we’ll do it differently. But the big mistake with Beethoven is to not realise that his tempo markings only apply at the start;

the reality is that speed changes through the movement.” People usually have their favourite Beethoven symphony, but McGegan says he’s never been able to pick one. “I’m afraid I love them all,” he says. It’s their novelty and perverse humour that particularly appeals to him. “Number One is great. It’s in Haydn’s world, but it’s still a remarkable piece of music. The Eighth is about the same scale but a completely different world – he has moved on, although in its humour it is still like Haydn. It has an antique minuet and no big slow movement. The big difference is that Eight has no slow introduction. Haydn almost always has one. But Beethoven’s Eighth rushes in like a frisky pet cat knocking everything over.” Beethoven Fest is about adding a dash of the unpredictable. Says McGegan: “We want to be flexible. Scholarship is fine, but the bottom line is we’re giving a performance to people of our time. We want to be moved, not given a pedantic lesson.”

»»ASO Beethoven Fest Friday, September 12 to Saturday, September 20 aso.com.au

borodin quartet Approaching their 70th concert season, the legendary Borodin Quartet return to Australia with their unmistakable mighty ‘Borodin sound’, heard at its finest in their performances of music by Shostakovich and Beethoven.

“Most remarkable was the oneness and the inner fire of each interpretation” MUSICAL TORONTO

THURSDAY 9 OCTOBER 7.30PM Adelaide Town Hall Tickets from just $42*

Visit musicaviva.com.au/Borodin | Book Now bass.net.au or 131 246 *Terms and conditions apply. Booking fees apply. Prices shown are C-Reserve in selected cities

20 The Adelaide Review September 2014

OZASIA

Red Like Blood Steeped in Chinese provincial iconography and the sacrifice of war, Qingdao Song & Dance Theatre’s spectacular staging of Red Sorghum promises

much more than history and perfect technique.

by Paul Ransom

e are used to history wars in Australia; they form part of a lively, pluralistic cultural discourse. Yet even within the more centrally controlled context of contemporary China, the battles of (and over) the past provide fertile ground for historians and artists alike. Indeed, the ongoing Sino/Japanese spat over war shrines and rocky outcrops are testament to the deeply riven historical perspectives of East Asia’s principal powerhouses.

However, it is the still-sensitive matter of Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s that sits at the heart of Nobel Prize winning author Mo Yan’s internationally acclaimed 1986 novel Red Sorghum. Subsequently made into a Golden Bear winning film by Zhang Yimou, it is now a spectacular physical theatre production; one which will make its Australian debut here in Adelaide as part of the OzAsia Festival. Speaking from China, director Xu Rui explains that the balance between historical exactness and the desire to craft a compelling work of dance and acrobatics is not as tricky as one might think. “We don’t think the two are opposite,” he argues. “On the contrary, the more we desire to create a beautiful work of art, the more important it is that we know and understand the historical facts and cultural implications.” Aside from the political and cultural delicacy that still attaches to the Japanese occupation, the challenge of distilling the book’s epic scale into a do-able work of dance was something that the entire Qingdao Song & Dance Theatre needed to embrace. Fortunately for Xu and his ensemble, Zhang Yimou’s film had already provided a blueprint for how to do this. “A dance drama does not have enough capacity to represent a whole novel. Dance tells a story using body language. It doesn’t describe complex historical facts but shows the state of people’s living. So we chose a time period basically consistent with the film, focusing on the period when ‘my grandfather’ and ‘my grandmother’ fought against their fate.” In other words, the most obviously dramatic and culturally loaded period of the book, as Xu further explains. “The grandparents’ fight is not only an individual struggle with their fate in a feudal society but also a nation’s fight against invasion and slaughter.” Beyond the spectacle of blood and history, Red Sorghum is steeped in Chinese cultural motifs, not the least of which is the sorghum bilcolor itself. A staple crop in Shandong province, where author Mo Yan comes from, it symbolises steadfastness; it is impervious in the face of ephemeral drama. Its symbolic power

resonates deeply with Chinese audiences, but what about Westerners? “There is always a cultural barrier,” Xu admits, “but that is where the advantage of dance sits. We should not get entangled in the complex interpretation of words, languages and conflicts, we just need to restore the story to pure body language and feel the common emotion of human beings.” That said, there is one other oft-cited difference between the Chinese dance aesthetic and the predominantly expressive Western style. China is globally renowned for producing dancers and creating full-scale productions of inch-perfect technique. Although this has wowed audiences, it has left many critics suggesting that Chinese dance is too militarily exact for its good. Director Xu Rui is only too pleased to take on this notion. “The emotion of dramatic conflict is an internal support to dancing technique,” he says. “Only when the emotion is strong enough is there a desire and reason to dance. Technique exists only for expressing emotion; otherwise, it becomes pale.” Adelaide audiences, he promises, can expect both heart and technique, not to mention the usual Chinese serving of sheer spectacle. However, Red Sorghum does not abandon

its peasant Shandong roots. The production incorporates provincial folk dance traditions into its otherwise glittering sensory overload. “This is because it reflects the qualities of people living in the land of Shandong,” Xu reveals. “We integrate these qualities with the characters and emotions. At the same time, we also absorb elements of Chinese classical dance, ballet and contemporary dance in creating our new modern dance style.” Recently awarded the Wenhau Grand Prize (the Ministry of Culture’s highest accolade for professional arts), Red Sorghum is a contemporary Chinese classic, reflecting both the emerging global confidence and deeply rooted heritage of its motherland; a heritage which , like sorghum, has proven strong enough to survive war, revolution and countless generations. Qingdao Song & Dance Theatre’s great achievement has been to maintain the ‘heritage’ of the work whilst reinvigorating it for post-millennium audiences.

»»Red Sorghum Wednesday, September 3 Festival Theatre adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/ozasia-festival

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PERFORMING ARTS

OZASIA HIGHLIGHTS

DREAM OF THE GHOST STORY

IBSEN IN ONE TAKE

Festival Theatre Friday, September 5 and Saturday, September 6 The Shandong Acrobatic Troupe present an ethereal spectacular of good versus evil based on a classic Qing Dynasty love fable of a man and a fox spirit, which features more than 50 performers.

Space Theatre Tuesday, September 16 and Wednesday, September 17 A movie shot live on stage shot by Director Wang Chang, Ibsen in One Take is an avant-garde interpretation of the works of playwright Henrik Ibsen.

‘6’ & ‘7’

TAN DUN: NU SHU

Dunstan Playhouse Friday, September 19 and Saturday, September 20 Tao Ye’s minimal contemporary dance company, TAO Dance Theatre, will present the world premiere of ‘7’ as well as ‘6’, the two latest productions of TAO’s famed minimal dance series that has captivated audiences across the globe.

Festival Theatre Saturday, September 27 Composer and conductor Tan Dun returns to OzAsia for the Australian premiere of Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women, a 13-movement symphony that brings to life the secret and ancient Nu Shu language.

Season 2 O 1 4

Maestro Series 3

Northern Lights Sunday 21 September 2014 6.30pm Elder hall

a d e l a i d e yo u t h o r C h e S t r a keith Crellin oam mekhla kumar John polglase rachmaninov Sibelius

Conductor Piano Lux Nova: A CONCERT OVERTURE FOR ORCHESTRA (world premiere) Piano Concerto No 2 Symphony No 2

book at baSS 131 246 www.bass.net.au

www.adyo.com.au

Based on The Suit by Can Themba, Mothobi Mutloatse, and Barney Simon

22 The Adelaide Review September 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

THIS MONTH The Adelaide Review’s guide to SEPTEMBER’s highlight PERFORMING ARTS events

Adelaide Youth Orchestras Youth Revolution Gala Concert Adelaide Town Hall Sunday, August 31, 3pm adyo.com.au

AICE Israeli Film Festival Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas Continues until Thursday, September 4 aiceisraelifilmfestival.com

The four orchestras (Adelaide Youth Orchestra, Adelaide Youth Wind Orchestra, Adelaide Youth Sinfonia and Adelaide Youth Strings) of the Adelaide Youth Orchestras combine for their annual gala Youth Revolution, which features 240 of the state’s best young musicians on stage.

The 11th annual Israeli Film Festival returns to Adelaide after its local debut last year. Presented by Palace Cinemas and the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE), the festival hosts an exciting collection of shorts and features including the Hebrew-Arabic dram Self Made, which won the Camera D’Or prize at Cannes.

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings Thebarton Theatre Saturday, September 6 sharonjonesandthedapkings.com Arguably the world’s premiere touring soul and deep funk outfit, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, return to Adelaide to tour their latest album Give People What They Want. The band is back in full swing after Jones’ recent treatment for cancer.

Joe Bonamassa Her Majesty’s Theatre Wednesday, September 17 jbonamassa.com

Touring his new album Different Shades of Blue, New York blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa will present a new show which features two sets, an acoustic opening half before he returns in electric mode.

24 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

dukas

the sorcerer’s apprentice

copland

appalachian spring suite

mozart

clarinet concerto

stravinsky

the firebird suite

FEEDING THE AUSTRALIAN JAZZ AND HILLBILLY MARKET South Australian musician John Bridgland has published a new book, Bending maple, carving spruce.

michael

stern

conductor

michael

collins

clarinet

mozart and

he book celebrates the career of Mount Barker mandolin and jazz guitar luthier, John Liddy, who died a year ago this month. John’s small output of 20 guitars and 40 mandolins deﬁnes him as South Australia’s only craftsman in Adelaide living history who produced as many, at such a high level, of these styles. While other South Australians (Bryan De Gruchy and Jim Redgate) have achieved international renown with their instruments, neither addressed the styles to the extent that John did - especially his ﬁne mandolins. The death of Adelaide mandolin luthier, John Liddy, 69, on 4 September 2013 may have inadvertently marked a peak in Australia’s musicians’ appetites for wanting to jam and perform bluegrass music, even though by that time the popularity of its apparently younger country cousin, ‘roots music’, was attracting large numbers of a new, younger crowd to festivals around Australia. It also probably page-marks the ageingtowards-retirement of a generation of Australian string-band musicians who surfed an ‘Aust-grass’ wave that for about 25 years until the mid-2000s allowed Australian guitar and mandolin luthiers to feed their families – but only modestly.

3 october 8pm festival theatre book at BASS 131 246 or bass.net.au

The formal demise in 2012 of the longstanding Harrietville Bluegrass Convention after 21 years under the same management – an event attended by John Liddy for at least six continuous years beginning in 2002 – also might be symptomatic of the end of one era, even though another group of musicians successfully managed its resuscitation in the same town in 2013, but at another site. Its features were different; the spirit was similar and augured well for another decade of such events. But only a few noted that John Liddy was gone. Some of that number would have been jazz guitarists coveting their 1940s-style arch-top instruments – the market John

Liddy targeted in the mid-1990s when he ﬁrst turned his mind to luthiery as a business. This was before a secondary business opportunity arose a few years later as he shifted to addressing Australian demand for the sought-after F model ‘Florentine’ mandolins, the darling of the Australian acoustic musicians’ cliques chasing their versions of hillbilly harmonies, better known in the US as bluegrass. Once upon a time – decades past – output of Australian-made mandolins was largely restricted to that of a tiny number of Australian luthiers, mainly in the eastern states, addressing the relatively undemanding requirements of folk musicians. The exception, of course, is reserved for the renowned and widely acknowledged Victorian master luthier, Steve Gilchrist, whose fine bluegrass ‘Model 5’ mandolins emerged in the 1980s and by the mid90s were captive to virtually insatiable US-fed, bluegrass-focused, professional demand – and priced well beyond what many Australian musicians could afford. Other Australian luthiers, however, whose focus was exclusively on the local market, were not in the same league. Until John Liddy began applying his wood crafting skills to mandolins in the early 2000s, musicians seeking highquality instruments for the playing of bluegrass music were largely restricted to a small range of Australian produce of variable quality (with exception to the much more expensive Gilchrist mandolins) or cheaper Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese brands imported by the capital city music retailers. A third but risky option was to self-import US-made instruments at a time when the Australian dollar was well below parity with the US dollar – netting a result not as expensive as Gilchrist instruments – but not cheap – and risky because of the import complexities and the fact that one could not ‘try before you buy’.

John Liddy was South Australia’s finest (and sole) mandolin luthier over a 10-year period to about 2010 that had seen him expand his small output from an original focus on arch-top (jazz) guitars. Upon commencement of his exploration into the mysteries of the mandolin, in 2000, he quickly created new and better opportunities for Australian bluegrass and folk musicians, because his mid-priced, professional quality mandolins filled an important market niche. The term ‘midpriced’ might require qualification, given that at the time of John’s death ‘cheap’ mandolins sold for less than $1000 but top-flight Gilchrist mandolins sold for up to $25,000. By comparison, Liddy instruments, selling between $3,000 (the A models) and $6,000 (the F models), fell into the category of ‘mid-priced’. Everything is relative… For most of his luthiery career John was based in the Adelaide hills suburb of Mount Barker, but he travelled regularly between Australian festivals and conventions in most states to exhibit and sell his instruments – especially mandolins. He had come from a fine-wood-furniture crafting background and had taken a sudden turn off the formal manufacturing highway to pursue a new, sole-trader existence: a diversion that led to a new crafting terrain, opening a fascinating new chapter in his life. In the early 2000s, Adelaide musician Paul Thompson interviewed John to create editorial content for John’s instrument website. It was at a time

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PERFORMING ARTS Australia’s love affair with bluegrass remains, but the stage cast has changed and is now fully wired into the range of musical alternatives. Mandolin music remains popular, but survives on the back page of the musical menu. For every 1,000 guitars sold in the nation’s music stores, there might be one mandolin. Further, the heavy emphasis on banjo-oriented bluegrass the way that Bill Monroe arranged it – with mandolin sharing front-row presence and audibility – has changed. Monroe’s death in 1996 and the challenges of playing the little instrument has meant that younger generations don’t see the mandolin in quite the same light as previous generations of players. The repertoire has changed.

when John’s luthiery career was building steam, not only offering customer-specified arch-top guitars, but also flat-back mandolins in the American F model style at a time when demand was exceeding local supply. John told him: “I made my first guitar in the early 1990s for my young son who had just started to play. It was a [Fender] Telecaster copy and little did I realise the implications this project would have. The first arch-top guitar soon followed [1996]. The wood tone blew me away. I came from a background of fine woodworking. Suddenly, I was making things that were alive, rather than furniture whose destiny was to sit in a corner looking nice, waiting to be dusted every now and then.” To sum up a life of fine wood and quiet wisdom – between 2000 and about 2010 John shared highly respected space in the Australian mandolin luthiery galaxy with only a handful of other men scattered across Australia; not more than five. Now there is one fewer, and all of those remaining are close to or on the wrong side of 60. It’s a reflection of the times: the slow Australian demise of a 1970s Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs-inspired, finger-pickin’, fun-filled era when bluegrass music had significantly more fans attending significantly more festivals and concerts for that genre than today. Australian festival events continue, demand for mandolins is less, and the on-stage ‘roots’ practitioners – the singers and strummers – are more often of a younger generation. Moreover, thanks to the internet, the instrument range now on offer is broader, more accessible and, from countries north of Australia, a lot cheaper. Their quality, of course, is less, but it increases the competition for local remaining luthiers.

Demand for the mandolin as an integral piece of the Australian bluegrass jigsaw is now relatively less than it was. Australian ‘roots’ musicians not well versed in the fundamentals of bluegrass still show an interest in the mandolin, but mainly for the wrong reasons. It’s seen as a ‘colour’ instrument, rather like the ukulele, a fun diversion between songs in a guitar-focused repertoire. Few musicians today exclusively play the mandolin and those that own one often unwittingly adopt guitar playing technique, side-stepping the approach necessary to allow the mandolin to best sing its own song. That’s an ominous sign for Australian mandolin craftsmen – other than Steve Gilchrist, whose enduring market has long been among well-heeled investors and high-salary ‘weekend warriors’ (amateurs) or US bluegrass professionals who know exactly how that song can be coaxed from maple and spruce and who might collect several over a career. But a legacy – not just of Liddy instruments – remains. Every Liddy instrument owner who purchased direct from John Liddy remembers his quiet, shy nature and his dry humour. He got a kick out of seeing and hearing his instruments played and, in the right hands, they will last generations because their construction is solid and clean and their intonation accurate. There were 40 Liddy mandolins (A and F models) made, but fewer than that are in Australian circulation today. There were 20 guitars, but significantly fewer than that in musicians’ hands today. Now, John Liddy’s brands are destined to be rare. You’re lucky if you own one, and so will be the person who inherits yours. But he or she will surely benefit, because they are destined to last generations and, with playing, grow ever sweeter in tone. Mandolin luthiery by Australians for Australians has not ended just because John Liddy has gone. But at John’s demise, something fine has been lost – a blend of time, place, selected maple and spruce, exceptionally skilled hands – and an eye and ear for the finer musical things in life.

AD EL AIDE S YMPHO NY O RCHE STRA

BEETHOVEN FEST 12 - 20 SEPTEMBER 2014

Beethoven Festival 1

Beethoven Fest 2

Nicholas McGegan Conductor Stephen Hough Piano Natsuko Yoshimoto Violin

Nicholas McGegan Conductor Robert Levin Piano

12 and 13 September Adelaide Town Hall

Beethoven Leonore Overture No 1 Symphony No 1 Romance in G major for violin & orchestra Piano Concerto No 5 Emperor

19 and 20 September Adelaide Town Hall

Beethoven Leonore Overture No 2 Piano Concerto No 1 Symphony No 8

+ Film | Talks | Dinner >> aso.com.au

» For more information on the book Bending maple, carving spruce: John Liddy, South Australian mandolin luthier, contact John Bridgland jbeditor@senet.com.au

26 The Adelaide Review September 2014

CINEMA Magic in the Moonlight by David Knight

Boyhood by Aimee Knight

Shot over 11 years in a young man’s life, Boyhood leaves a lasting impression with its gorgeous performances, inspired casting and acute relatability. Opening with six-year-old Mason’s (Ellar Coltrane) magical insights on the lifecycle of wasps, director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunset) touches base with the boy on 45 intermittent days across his childhood and adolescence. Teenage milestones like smokes and kisses are captured with an affectionate, loyal lens as Mason faces familial and personal problems for the first time.

The darling of Sundance and one of the best in show at Berlin International Film Festival, the film is a feat of production in its scope and pace. Sustaining absolute rapture across its 164 minutes, the cast is impeccable. Linklater picked young players Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater (admittedly his daughter) at the ages of six and seven respectively. The trust placed in them pays off on-screen as the characters cycle through seasons with parents, step-parents, enemies, friends and extended family. Those categories aren’t always mutually exclusive, as Mason and Samantha grow to discover. Periodically the kids wilt and eventually blossom in the constant care of mum Olivia (Patricia Arquette). Devoted to a fault, Olivia is extremely empathetic in that

IFF2014 adelaide review_Layout 1 22/08/14 12:50 PM Page 1

Tickets on sale now!

An instant coming-of-age classic, Boyhood joins the evergreen ranks of Stand by Me and Pretty in Pink (minus the candy coating). It’s a rare treat to see kids excel in an area of their own choosing. Boyhood proves this should not be a privilege but a birthright.

With pseudoscience, spiritualism and mysticism rampant on social media – and awfully increasingly more ‘mainstream’ sites – the timing of Woody Allen’s latest romp could not be more apt, which is a surprise given it’s an Allen film, especially one set in the 1920s. Allen is an infamous non-believer, whose best films (Crimes & Misdemeanors and Match Point) show there is no higher purpose or fate. With this in mind, Colin Firth plays the perfect Allen foil in Stanley, a grumpy, stubborn and sarcastic magician, who dresses as a horrible caricature of a Chinese mystic (complete with Fu Manchu moustache, bald head and ponytail) to perform under the stage name Wei Ling Soo. A visit from old friend Howard (Simon McBurney) convinces Stanley to travel to the South of France to debunk a psychic (Sophie – Emma Stone) who Howard believes is fleecing a rich family with her supposed psychic abilities.

»»Boyhood opens on September 4. Rated M

At first, Stanley is a bit of a bore, despite some sarcastic zingers, but he becomes more likeable as he falls under Sophie’s spell, which isn’t hard to believe as Emma Stone (in a brilliant comedic performance) is enchanting as Sophie

she’s just as confused as her offspring. Here Linklater charmingly reassures that we’re all just winging it, but we’ll get there eventually.

Mature themes, coarse language, sexual references and drug use

COMMENCES SEP 25 AT PALACE NOVA CINEMAS ADVANCE SCREENINGS SEP 19–21

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CINEMA 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH BY DM BRADLEY

Wannabe-Dark Lord Nick Cave, now into his later 50s, celebrates his 20,000 days on earth with this entertaining chunk of self-mythologising that’s part documentary, part mockumentary, part ego-trip and, knowing Cave, part big joke too.

and plays an extremely likeable psychic. As the family (which includes another wonderful Jacki Weaver performance as the sweet but gullible matriarch, Grace) and even Stanley start believing Sophie’s spiritual visions and communication abilities, the audience wonders if Allen, like Stanley, has abandoned reason for mumbo jumbo. You will have to discover that for yourself. Over the last 10 years, Allen’s dramas (Blue Jasmine, Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona) have received more praise

NIGHT MOVES BY DM BRADLEY

Kelly Reichardt’s latest deliberately borrows its title from director Arthur Penn’s jaundiced, Gene Hackman-starring 1975 drama Night Moves, and therefore evidently wants to capture the famously dark mood and paranoid style of ‘70s New Hollywood. And it does, to a point, although this is obviously a movie about right now. Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) is a young environmentalist who’s been raised and now works in a green commune, and he and his rather more privileged girlfriend Deena (Dakota Fanning) muse often over scarily ‘relevant’ themes with like-minded friends and potential inductees to their cause. When they happen to meet Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a military vet with would-be-revolutionary ideas disguising his vengeful and slightly unhinged side, the three decide that a nearby hydroelectric dam is a symbol of corporate greed and ecological devastation, and so they plot to blow it up. Reichardt watches their elaborate scheming with much of the same ‘neo-realistic’ detachment that

than his comedies and while Magic in the Moonlight isn’t an Allen comedy classic to rival Annie Hall or Zelig, it is a late-career romp up there with Midnight in Paris as one of Allen’s most enjoyable comedies of the last decade.

» Magic in the Moonlight is in cinemas now. Rated PG

featured in her previous pics Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, and the tension rises as they buy the items necessary to create explosives, get hold of fake IDs, obtain the use of a speedboat and more. Uneasiness and mistrust within the trio also simmers, with Josh jealous that Deena seems to fancy Harmon and annoyed that both of them are treating him like a fool. It’s striking how this film all about environmentalists seems to be so anti-environmentalist. Or is it? Are they, in fact, just flawed people who get in way over their heads while trying to do that ever-elusive ‘right thing’? With a meaner, considerably less-cute-thanexpected performance from Eisenberg and one of the best adult turns so far from Fanning, this might feel overlong for some audiences, and its stillness could perhaps be seen as slowness (or even dullness). Nevertheless, Reichardt’s richly drawn characters make it often fascinating, as we observe their contradictions and very human failings, and finally build to a daringly unresolved finale.

After a cool credits sequence that runs through a mass of historical footage and images of Cave growing up and becoming the guy he is today, we cut to Cave as he awakens at his house in Brighton, England, and his voiceover begins. He considers staying home to annoy his wife, but instead decides to drive to the studio and, later, the archive. After a quick Kylie Minogue joke, we’re into the business of who this man is and what exactly we’re supposed to be watching. A television interview then seemingly commences, but it plays more like a therapy session, and is cut short when Cave becomes emotional. Then we’re back on the road as he grumbles about the appalling climate in the UK. We get the ﬁrst cameo, as his old pal Ray Winstone pops up beside him in a fantasy (?) sequence, and the two ruminate over getting older, before, a while on, former Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld appears for a tense chat and, of course, Kylie eventually materialises in the backseat (and the two don’t make eye contact). Our subject also pays a visit to beardy Bad Seed Warren Ellis, who cooks up eel pasta before we see them and the rest of the band (and a choir of kids) in the studio nutting out songs for the Push the Sky Away album, one of which makes Cave smile and actually laugh. Documentary purists might be irked at this pseudo-phantasmagoria (sorry about that) co-written and co-directed by longtime Cave collaborators Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, but the sometimes reverential, sometimes masturbatory tone seems appropriate when dealing with someone like Cave. It’s all worthwhile when we see him actually perform, and it’s obvious that time hasn’t robbed him of his awesome, even frightening, talent.

“Gripping… Eisenberg’s best performance since The Social Network” Richard Roeper, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“Nail biting… almost Hitchcockian”

David Rooney, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

» 20,000 Days on Earth is in cinemas now. Rated MA.

“As tightly wound and gripping as a thumbscrew”

Robbie Collin, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

“One of the most sharpeyed and politically attuned film makers of her generation”” Justin Chang, VARIETY

opens

SEPTEMBER 11

Palace Nova Eastend, Trak Cinemas » Night Moves opens on September 11. Rated M.

28 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

VISUAL ARTS

CAO FEI BY JANE LLEWELLYN

ao Fei has exhibited at all the major galleries around the world – MOMA, PS1, Guggenheim – and while audiences might have caught glimpses of her work in exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, this is the ﬁrst time a survey show of her work has occurred in Australia. The CACSA exhibition features eight video presentations spanning almost 14 years of her practice. Cao Fei is preoccupied with alternative worlds. In early works like Cosplayers she focuses on blurring the boundaries between real and imagined worlds as her characters (dressed in costumes based on animé, manga, video games and movies) navigate the streets of Guangzhou. Cao Fei’s cosplayers are in a somewhat parallel universe reﬂecting China’s

exhibitions gallery shop

Cao Fei, A Mirage

younger generation and the restlessness of life in modern China. Cao Fei takes this idea further by presenting a straight up virtual reality world in a series of works based on the online video game community Second Life. In these works Fei adopts the avatar China Tracey and presents

STEPPING OUT

29 Aug - 21 Sep 2014 TWO EXHIBITIONS

experience art @ hamilton

An exhibition of paintings by Hazel Harding and ceramics by Marilyn Saccardo

5 - 26 September 2014

(left) acrylic on canvas by Lynly Cooper (above) acrylic on canvas by Otto Siebensritt

Mixed Palette paintings and pottery by Bill McSwain meet the artist 2pm, Sun 7 Sep

Hazel Harding, Stepping Out Series - Mermaid, Oil on Canvas

artwork in various media by students from Hamilton Senior Campus - Adult students

Opens: Friday 5 September 6 pm – 8 pm

a future world that is an idealised alternative to the real world but at the same time explores the loneliness and isolation that these virtual worlds possess. Looking at her career, one can see the evolution from early works, where she explores alternative realities, to the later works like Haze and Fog, which are more dystopian in their vision. CACSA Curator Logan MacDonald says: “The shift has been in trying to show these virtual worlds and real worlds as very separate things. That people can play out different lives but then seeing that blend and merge, leading into Haze and Fog where the ultimate fantasy of a dystopian society plays out with zombies and a horror film quality to it.” Director of OzAsia Festival Joseph Mitchell points out the influence that Matthew Barney has had on a generation like Cao Fei’s. Barney’s influence is particularly evident in the work Haze and Fog in terms of his epic video artwork. “What I find interesting is the fact that [Cao] Fei is using it in the context of Beijing and

taking what is undeniably a western European inﬂuence and recontextualising it in terms of her city, her generation and how she sees the city from a very surrealistic perspective,” says Mitchell. In some ways the exhibition reflects developments in technology and online practices. These developments have had a significant impact on society and culture especially in developing countries like China. A boom in online culture in the early- to mid2000s created an interest in artiﬁcial worlds and now through social networking the line between real and virtual is even more blurred.

» Cao Fei Theatrical Mirror: Living Between the Real and the Unreal Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Sunday, September 14 to Monday, October 20 cacsa.org.au

Launch guest: David Baker, artist and photographer Arrive at the launch at 6 pm for your chance to win a lucky door prize! Free artist demonstrations on Saturday 6, 13 and 20 September 2 pm - 4 pm.

Free entry - all welcome!

STEVE WOODBURY PAINTINGS

MIKE NICHOLLS

PAINTINGS & SCULPTURE Pepper Street Arts Centre Exhibitions, Gift Shop, Art Classes, Coffee Shop. 558 Magill Road, Magill PH: 8364 6154

22 August 13 September 2014

Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 12 noon - 5 pm Gallery M, Marion Cultural Centre 287 Diagonal Rd, Oaklands Pk SA P:8377 2904 info@gallerym.net.au

www.gallerym.net.au

An arts and cultural initiative funded by the City of Burnside

pepperstreetartscentre.com.au

444 South Road, Marleston, SA 5033 | T +61 8 8297 2440 | M 0421 311 680 | art @bmgart.com.au | www.bmgart.com.au

The Adelaide Review September 2014 29

adelaidereview.com.au

VISUAL ARTS

Mooi Indie

Riyadi’s works from the series Noise from the fertile land are also striking. He takes found portraits of Indonesians in western poses and dress and recreates them adding his trademark cartoon imagery. The works make reference to old versus new, and traditional versus modern. Also interesting are the stop-motion animation works by the artist collective Tromarama, formed in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Ruddy Hatumena and Herbert Hans. The works bring to life traditional objects like porcelain plates and napkins, as if the images have jumped straight off the object onto the screen, thrusting them back into the contemporary limelight.

The OzAsia exhibition Mooi Indie dismisses any preconceived notions about contemporary Indonesian art.

ith Indonesia being one of Australia’s closest neighbours it’s surprising how little we have seen of contemporary Indonesian art. With awareness and interest growing, the current exhibition Mooi Indie – Beautiful Indies: Indonesian Art Now at Samstag Museum of Art is timely. Curator Matthias Arndt presents the largest exhibition of its kind in Australia to date and dismisses any preconceived notions we might have about contemporary Indonesian art. The exhibition includes work by Jumaldi Alfi, Eko Nugroho, Wedhar Riyadi, Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo, Entang Wiharso and the Tromarama group in a variety of media from volcanic ash paintings and video works to embroideries and aluminium cutouts. “The idea is to give an overview and introduce the depth of Indonesian art, which is not only street art related or more expressive in style, but it also has many conceptual sides like the work of Tromarama and Sunaryo.” ‘Mooi Indie’, is a Dutch term for ‘beautiful indies’ referencing the late 19th century/early 20th century movement led by foreign artists in Indonesia during colonisation. It was first used as the title of a series of reproductions of watercolours by the Dutch artist Fredericus Jacobus van Rossum du Chattel (1856-1917) depicting romanticised views of Indonesia. “It was the Germans, the Belgians, the Dutch artists that started Mooi Indie, this idealisation

Mooi Indies - Beautiful Indies, installation detail, 2014, Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia

of Indonesia as a primitive country while it was being exploited and colonised. For them it was a paradise of free artistic expression,” explains Arndt. One of the most important visual artists before and during independence, Sindu Sudjojono (1913-1986), rejected the Mooi Indie movement as an idealised view of the colonial period and not a true representation of Indonesian society. The phrase now, in a sense, recognises the colonisation of Indonesia’s art history as much as the colonial period itself. The artists Arndt has selected are attempting to re-write this history by embracing concepts and ideas of traditional Indonesian art but presenting them in a modern context. “Each artist shows, in a different way, that their home and background is Indonesian. Each artist clearly has their own background and story and gets their material from Indonesia but emphasises the multi-layered culture that is there and reclaims their identity as a contemporary Indonesian artist,” explains Arndt.

work Ashfall no. 4 is created using volcanic ash, pushing the boundaries of painting and presenting an image, which uses the soil of Indonesia but because of its minimalist structure, could be the work of a western artist. At first glance Alfi’s work from the series Melting Memories - Rereading Landscape Mooi Indie looks as if he has taken a Mooi Indie painting and collaged or mounted it onto a blackboard but on closer inspection you realise it’s all painted. “By doing this, he says, ‘Now we study this again, now we go through this again’. Basically he reclaims this foreign influence on the history of art of Indonesia,” says Arndt.

Mooi Indie is just a snapshot of the fascinating art coming out of the region. Arndt says: “The reason I am putting this exhibition together is to show that art is a universal language and art from Indonesia is authentic, it’s engaged, it’s committed, the artists are engaged in their society and they produce relevant art.”

»»Mooi Indie - Beautiful Indies: Indonesian Art Now Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art Continues until Friday, October 3 unisa.edu.au/samstagmuseum

Bluey Roberts, Spirits of the bush (detail) 1999

by Jane Llewellyn

Sunaryo, for instance, grew up in Bandung, where most of the conceptual art of Indonesia comes from, and then went on to study at St Martin’s College in London. “An Indonesian artist with total Indonesian upbringing goes to London to free himself and is trained and brings that back to take quite literally the soil of his country to make his paintings.” The

Bluey Roberts

AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE 4 September - 25 October 2014

louise feneley viewpoint 20 September - 4 October 2014 www.hillsmithgallery.com.au

A survey exhibition recognising 5 decades of one of South Australia’s leading artists. Born in Meningie in 1948, Bluey Roberts is highly regarded for his paintings, carvings and murals that depict life in the Coorong. This exhibition celebrates Tandanya’s 25th anniversary. Visitors to this exhibition will walk along Bluey’s iconic mural at Tandanya’s entrance. National Aboriginal Cultural Institute Tandanya 253 Grenfell Street (cnr East Tce) Adelaide SA 5000 Tel +61 8224 3200 Open Mon-Sat 9:00am – 4:00pm

30 The Adelaide Review September 2014

VISUAL ARTS

Profile: Damien Shen

Through documenting his family history, Shen found a connection with the audience. “Family orientated stories are very powerful... people can always identify with something. Everyone has their battles and stories and struggles and triumphs. My family has had incredible struggles but there is also the other side of the spectrum in terms of triumphs and role models. Most families aren’t too different to that.” Shen is exhibiting in Placement, Displacement, Replacement, part of this year’s OzAsia Festival. Curator Daniel Connell assigned each artist in the exhibition one of the words to consider – Bindu Mehra ‘placement’, Hemant Sareen ‘displacement’ and Shen ‘replacement’.

by Jane Llewellyn

hile Damien Shen was on a two-week trip exploring Australia’s major galleries, it occurred to him that art is about telling stories. “Creating art is not just about technical ability, it’s about the story and it’s also about how you express the story... if you can pull all those things together you can reach the next level,” Shen explains. To reach the next level, Shen is looking at his own story and drawing on it in his work. As he nears 40 years of age, Shen is approaching his practice with a newfound maturity that wasn’t available to him before. “It’s been such a rapid progression,” he says. “It was almost meant to

happen this late. If it happened any earlier I would have been too immature.” Shen (who originally studied illustration before moving into graphic design, running his own business for eight years, and most recently

Associates for Fellowship

Artists: Fiona Dowler, Ian Fraser, Donald Lock, Ann Nolan, Haley O’Shea, Verna Pile, Oliver Shepherd, Steve Smart, Tracy Vandepeer, Simon Waters & Swee Wah Yew

27 August – 14 September An exhibition of artworks by Eleven RSASA Associate Members for consideration of RSASA Fellowship. A body of artworks from each artist in a variety of mediums. Most works for sale.

RSASA Members’ Spring Exhibition – Over to U: 21 September – 12 October www.rsasarts.com.au

Where: RSASA Gallery, Level 1, Institute Bldg, Cnr North Tce & Kintore Ave, Adelaide. Mon – Friday 10.30 – 4.00pm, Sat & Sun 1 – 4.00pm. Closed public holidays. For more information: Bev Bills, Director, RSASA Office: 8232 0450 or 0415 616 900.

Royal South Australian Society of Arts Inc. Level 1 Institute Building, Cnr North Terrace & Kintore Ave Adelaide, Ph/Fax: 8232 0450 www.rsasarts.com.au rsasarts@bigpond.net.au Mon- Fri 10.30-4.30pm Sat & Sun 1- 4pm Pub Hol. Closed.

A view at Bassano In Tererina, Italy, Acrylic by Swee Wah Yew

ROYAL SOUTH AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY OF ARTS INC.

working in Aboriginal health) set off on his trip of art discovery a little over 12 months ago. “The goal was to soak some stuff in and basically what came out of it is a better understanding of what it means to be an artist,” he says. At one point during his trip, while standing in front of a work by Vernon Ah Kee at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Shen asked himself, ‘Can I still draw?’ (he hadn’t for 10 years) and, ‘Can I get into a major gallery one day?’ He was so inspired and eager to see if he still had it, he immediately bought some art supplies and enrolled in a drawing course with David Jon Kassan at Robin Eley’s Art Academy. In the midst of the course, Shen’s Aboriginal grandmother passed away and he started considering his family history – he is Chinese/Aboriginal – and decided he wanted to document it. From there things happened quickly for Shen. He started drawing again, held his first exhibition (Drawing on the Heroes Who Shape Us at the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Artspace Gallery), and won the NAIDOC South Australian Artist of the Year award.

“The notion of replacement I connected with was returning something to its rightful place. That’s important from an Aboriginal perspective,” says Shen. It’s particularly relevant for Shen because a lot of the remains of his Ngarrindjeri ancestors were taken overseas for research and Shen’s uncle, Major Sumner, had been involved in delegations to bring some of the remains back, returning them to country. “I’m really interested in the idea around the repatriation of Ngarrindjeri remains. Why the remains were taken and how they were taken.” The next 12 months are already shaping up to be busy for Shen with exhibitions on the horizon and plans to delve further into oil painting. “My goal is to educate myself and educate others in an artistic way that challenges me and feeds my soul as I create it.” If Shen continues to feed his soul through art it’s only a matter of time before we see his work hanging in major galleries.

»»Placement, Displacement, Replacement Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre Saturday, September 11 to Friday, October 10 facebook.com/damien.shen

T’Arts Collective In conjunction with the ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CENTRE’s OZ ASIA FESTIVAL 2014

Gays Arcade (off Adelaide Arcade)

Exciting artist run contemporary gallery / shop in the heart of Adelaide.

CAO FEI’S THEATRICAL MIRROR: LIVING BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE UNREAL CAO FEI (CHINA) 12. September_20. October 2014 Contemporary Art Centre SA 14 Porter Street Parkside www.cacsa.org.au

Window Display at Tarts from 1st September to 27th September Open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm Phone 8232 0265

www.tartscollective.com.au Find Us On Facebook

The Adelaide Review September 2014 31

adelaidereview.com.au

VISUAL ARTS

Vital Signs

the mid-20th century British artist David Bomberg. The narrative Adam Dutkiewicz traces in his book provides a comprehensively researched and informative insight into the achievements of Thompson as a much-loved, much-travelled, talented, aspirational but flawed artist, who on a good day could blow everyone else off the walls with his take no prisoners approach to creating an image from inner conviction but who in his later years struggled for consistency and conviction in accommodating abstraction.

Suddenly the last pieces of the Frank Roy (‘FR’) Thompson jigsaw are clicking into place. He is without doubt the berserker of post war Adelaide modernism.

by John Neylon

o add to the Viking spin, FR was renowned for his legendary dance of the shirt, tie and trousers at parties, which often resulted in one naked artist either clearing the room with ecstatic spins or heading off into the night. One account has the artist wandering nude, post-party, through the streets of Rose Park to his studio a few kilometres away. The next day found him calling out to a passersby to organise his clothes to be sent around, as he had no others to wear. Such antics confirmed a 1950s stereotypical image of the creative artist as a bohemian flouter of social conventions. Well, as we know from similar behaviour associated with the Adelaide Angries young contemporaries of the period, this Rabelaisian attitude to art and society was exactly what free spirits of the day needed to counteract the conservatism of mid-20th century tidytown Adelaide. The remarkable thing, in Thompson’s instance, is that his origins and early promise as an artist were so conventional. A legacy of £500 from an uncle enabled the aspirant 18-year-old artist to enroll in the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne. Here he studied painting under Bernard Hall and drawing under WB McInnes. In 1922, his fifth year of studies, he was awarded the Hugh Ramsay Prize for portraiture. The imprint of his solid grounding in tonal illusionism, conventional composition and figurative drawing is evident in the early works in the Carrick Hill exhibition and in Adam Dutkiewicz’s recently published book, Francis Roy Thompson: Painter of Grace and Rebellion

samone turnbull the shape of things 20 September - 4 October 2014 www.hillsmithgallery.com.au

Francis Roy Thompson, Ochre cliffs, (detail) Central Australia, c. 1952, oil on board

(Moon Arrow Press) which complements the exhibition. Thompson’s year of European travel after winning the Hugh Ramsay Prize exposed him to alternative modes of art, particularly Post Impressionism and Expressionism. As a result his paintwork became bolder and colours more luminous. Further travel and study in London in 1930 consolidated this journey to the brighter, expressionist side. Art critic for the Melbourne Herald, Basil Burdett was on the money when, in commenting on Thompson’s work in a 1938 exhibition, referred to Thompson’s “massive handling of colour and brilliance” as not only suggestive of van Gogh (one of Thompson’s favourite artists) but reminiscent of Sickert and the Camden Town painters. From the 1940s into the 1950s, a period that saw Thompson relocate from Melbourne to Adelaide, critical appreciation of his style continued to praise its vigour and assurance. Ivor Francis observed that his work was full of poetry. Thompson’s own assessment was that a “work should have Vitality, in fact an independent life of its own. The Art of painting is to animate a flat surface aesthetically. All else is simply an added interest.” The move to Adelaide had a number of benefits particularly the ease of access it offered to the Flinders Ranges and the Red Centre beyond. Flinders-related paintings are a feature of both the

exhibition and book illustrations. In works including Rocky outcrop, The Grandeur, Flinders Ranges and Flinders Ranges landscape, the artist captures a tangible sense of compressed geological forces beneath a patina of weathered surfaces. Such works and other Alice Springs-related paintings deny the viewer conventional perspectives and atmospherics. The rich impastos offer instead a roller coaster ride of heaving brush marks and patterning. This intent to capture the muscular quality of topographies is also evident in other equally compelling landscapes, particularly Port Willunga and The valley, Belair. They have qualities of structural compression and raw-boned gesture one associates with the work of

All power to Carrick Hill for this opportunity to see so many rarely exhibited works and to Dutkeiwicz for self-publishing a landmark monograph which fills in significant gaps in the Adelaide modernist story and introduces Frank Roy Thompson to a wider audience than the inner circle of fans who have long appreciated his distinctive talents and contribution to Australian art. He was a man of good heart and great generosity who believed in making commitments.

»»Grace and Rebellion: The Art of Francis Roy Thompson Carrick Hill Continues until Sunday, November 30 Francis Roy Thompson: Painter of Grace and Rebellion, Adam Dutkiewicz (Moon Arrow Press)

32 The Adelaide Review September 2014

VISUAL ARTS

Shimmer From Port Noarlunga to the McLaren Vale, the south of the city will be illuminated with photographic exhibitions as part of the third Shimmer Photographic Biennale, which will feature an array of local artists, as well as American nature and adventure sport photographer Tom Bol as its Artist in Residence. by David Knight

he last time Shimmer was held in 2012, nearly 6000 people attended Shimmer events in the City of Onkaparinga including 600 people at its launch event. Aside from Bol, who was named as one of America’s Top 50 Visionaries by National Geographic Adventure, Shimmer will feature local emerging and established photographers including Robert McFarlane, Milton Wordley and Gary Cockburn. City of Onkaparinga Mayor Lorraine Rosenberg believes Shimmer, which features

more than 40 artists showing in 32 venues, is strong enough to be recognised as a major festival on the state’s arts calendar. “We’re offering all photographers the opportunity to engage in workshops and share ideas with each other,” she explains. “At the same time, we’re providing access to the best local and international professionals, so emerging and hobby photographers can learn from and be inspired by them. We want to make the festival exciting, thought-provoking and engaging for photographers at any level and bring everyone together to celebrate the contribution these artists make to our communities.”

Deborah Paauwe, Crown of Roses.

This includes initiatives such as PITCHer, a live crowd-funding event where “10 preselected photographers will present concepts for a photographic project, with the audience deciding who wins the substantial cash prize”.

UNTITLED PROJECT2 PHOTO EXHIBITION

“We’re also excited about Hammered, a live auction event hosted at Rosemount Estate, our Gold Sponsor for Shimmer,” says Rosenberg. “A photograph kindly donated by Robert McFarlane will be auctioned to the highest bidder with the proceeds being awarded to the most popular festival exhibition as voted by the general public.” The Major wants to continually grow the

Tom Bol

COLLECTIVE INTRO: RYAN CANTWELL

7-9PM

Foggy Morning

GALLERY 1 1 TORRENS STREET MITCHAM 5/9 (OPENING NIGHT) - 26/9

festival to attract visitors from outside of its council borders.

Outsourcing Mothers(2014), HD, single-channel, color, sound, 10:50 minutes

Wait for Red, otherwise sink or fly

Bendigo artist

TERRY JARVIS Magnificent watercolour exhibition UNTIL 14TH SEPTEMBER

Kahori Kamiya NY-based artist, Kahori Kamiya, explores the idea of frailty in individual identity through her new video works: Job Interview and Outsourcing Mothers.

10 August – 28 September 1 Thomas St (cnr Main North Rd) Nailsworth prospect.sa.gov.au facebook.com/ProspectGallery

DAVID SUMNER GALLERY 359 Greenhill Road Toorak Gardens Ph: 8332 7900

Tues to Fri 11-5 | Sat to Sun 2-5 www.david-sumner-gallery.com

“We’ve already attracted visitors to our previous Shimmer festivals but we’re conscious of the need to continually grow that sector of the market to raise the festival’s profile and reach the potential we know the event has. This is why we have supported Red Poles to bring international photographer Tom Bol to Australia as Shimmer’s Artist in Residence and why we are continually building and broadening our sponsorship and partner base.” Bol, a Colorado-based photographer, is famed for his nature and adventure sports photographs for magazines as well as his book Adventure Sports Photography: Creating

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014 33

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

VISUAL ARTS Dramatic Images in Wild Places. He will host two workshops while at Shimmer.

much to admire in netsuke traditions. For her, it is partly their talismanic character, the tactile and compressed nature of expression and their capacity to “tell stories using succinct visual prompts”. Robinson’s own practice is characterised by powerful, open-ended, narrative elements and a dalliance with the dark side in the form of superstitions, demons and macabre goings on.

“I’ve always wanted to visit Australia, and have met many people on my workshops from there. I started talking with Sam from Red Poles in the spring about coming down and talking about my recent work involving advanced lighting techniques. Things just developed from there into becoming Artist in Residence for Shimmer.”

A favoured motif within her sculptures has been the goat, pressed into service as some kind of psychic bellwether for anxious times. Of her work Stop she says that it is an “inherently bawdy work with its elongated penis bound in a twisted branch”.

Bol says he became interested in shooting wilderness and adventure sport after becoming an outdoor guide once he graduated from journalism school. “I lived in a tent most of the year, teaching climbing, kayaking and skiing. I couldn’t get enough time in the mountains, and really became obsessed with climbing. Later I started photographing well-known outdoor athletes, and this led to some big breaks early in my career. I’ve been photographing adventure sports for 25 years, and I still can’t contain my excitement when I am going out for a day of shooting.” Away from the technical skills, are there broader lessons that Bol can teach aspiring photographers when hosting his classes Portraits & Location: Lighting the Right Location, The Right Light and Action Photography & Hypersync, Capturing Moments & Motion? “Beside the technical aspects, there are some universal concepts I try teach participants. One concept would be to follow your intuition. When teaching lighting we talk about many rules and guidelines, and sometimes the technical overwhelms the creative. I think it is important for all photographers to follow their intuition, shoot what feels right creatively whether it breaks the rules or not. Another idea would be connecting with your subject. There is real honesty and trust between photographer and subject, and this relationship comes through in the ﬁnal image. The better you connect with your subject, the better your ﬁnal images will be.”

» Shimmer Photographic Biennale Friday, August 29 to Sunday, September 28 For more information phone The Arts Centre, Port Noarlunga 8326 5577 or visit onkaparingacity.com/shimmer

Julia Robinson, Stop, boiled wool, thread, timber,

Okimono, Ashinaga Tenaga (Long Legs and Long

2012. Photograph by James Field. Julia Robinson

Arms), late 19th century, boxwood, horn, ivory,

is represented by Greenaway Art Gallery and Anna

Bequest of Miss Sarah Crabb 1925, Art Gallery of

Pappas Gallery.

South Australia

Jump Cuts Contemporary takes on the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collections

BY JOHN NEYLON

ulia Robinson’s Stop talks to the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Okimono, Ashinaga Tenaga (Long Legs and Long Arms)

It is a small tragedy that hands that caress iPhones may never know the kiss of a netsuke nestled in the palm. Global social media vs secretive tactile pleasure? No contest. These little carvings will always ﬁnd a way into the heart, be it through touch, visual seduction or the knowledge that nothing can completely erase their stories.

In Adelaide, we are blessed because a century-old benefaction to the Art Gallery of South Australia has resulted in an important collection of around 300 Japanese netsuke, inr� and other carvings. When face to face with these exquisitely crafted and realised sculptures, it is useful to know that the netsuke, in particular, were worn close to the body as miniature toggles to secure small containers, suspended from men’s belts, principally during the Edo period (1615–1867).

“It refers to a superstitious belief in the power of knots to act as contraception, a symbolic binding of the fertility of couples. This work seems to share the slightly perverse but good-natured sense of humour found in the netsuke depicting the cooperative, long-legged, long-armed fishermen. The elongation of the limbs (including, if you like, the sexual ‘limb’) is playful and naughty – a perversion of nature but all in the service of a good story.” These two artworks, so distant in time from each other, have much in common, particularly a delight in stretching possibilities. Running with this Japanese context, is Stop a variant of genital origami? Perhaps one day Robinson will discover my all-time favourite Japanese monster: the fearful Ittan-momen, a possessed roll of cotton that smothers people by wrapping itself around their faces. Awesome.

Later, netsuke carvers used related techniques on ornamental sculptures known as okimono, for export to the West. Most were inspired by legends, folk tales and beliefs. The okimono Ashinaga Tenaga (Long Legs and Long Arms) is a personal favourite. It has just the right balance of moral dictum and folksy humour. Ashinaga, he’s the one with very long legs. Tenaga, the one on his back, may have very short legs, but boy, has he got long arms. Too bad for the octopus when these two jokers team up to go fishing. Have you ever seen a better visual metaphor for productive cooperation? Perhaps it could provide a model for Liberal and Labor to deal with Clive Palmer. As a keen student of folklore, among other things, Adelaide artist Julia Robinson ﬁnds

Adelaide Central School of Art

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34 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

A-Z CONTEMPORARY ART

ARTSPEAK LONGUEUR Why should literature have exclusivity on such a useful term? When it comes to serving up long, tedious passages some artists are experts in the trade. LETTRIST GROUP A mid 20th century European art movement involving the collaging of letters accompanied by pigment. This kind of activity apparently intercut the subjective, the social, the artistic and the political. A lot of people don’t know this.

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L = LAUGH You’ve got to be joking The English art critic Matthew Collings starts the Hollow Laughter chapter of his This is Modern Art book with, “There are many jokes in Modern Art. Most of them are not funny.” Undeterred he

Luna Park, Sydney, 2014. Photograph John Neylon

then goes on to classify the Top Ten of Modern Art jokes including the outrageously obvious or obscure, jokes about shit, sex, bottoms, any old rubbish, posh jokes in French, Zen jokes, do-artin jokes. And so on. It’s a big menu and you get to choose. The primary principle is inconsistency. You need to serve your audience a puzzle. And when it’s solved the reward is to laugh with relief. Warning. If the audience doesn’t get it (i.e. solve the cognitive riddle as they say) then no laughs and no cigar. Art jokes The American artist Richard Prince shows how. A pink elephant, a green kangaroo and two yellow snakes strolled up to the bar. “You’re a little early boys”, said the bartender, “He ain’t here yet.” So where’s the art in something like this? Simple. Make it into an artwork by printing or screening the joke as text onto a coloured background. Size no limit. The bigger, the more likely people will take it seriously. Start with something simple like ‘Knock Knock’ or ‘When is a door not a door?’ jokes. Art revisited Restaging familiar art works or decontextualising them through the agency of ﬁlm or photography is insane fun. It avoids the messy business of actually dealing with what the work might be

about (e.g. Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare or Paul McCarthy’s Potato Heads). So imagine a script which involves an actor playing Nigella Lawson playing Judy Chicago making decisions about table settings for The Dinner Party. “So, shall we put Kim Kardashian on the Primordial Goddesses side?” mused the artist. You think that is bad? Consider what a journalist actually wrote about meeting the ‘real ‘artist. “So, what do you think?” she asked, smiling. The 67-year-old artist had bright red curls and was wearing violet-tinted glasses and a matching sequined shirt. Cut to an actor playing Carl Andre gazing down at a line of ﬁrebricks. “ You know”, he says, looking into the camera, “the more I look at it the more I like it.” Here’s another idea. Cast an actor as Joseph Beuys talking to a dead hare. Suddenly the hare is revealed as Basil Brush (the ﬁctional anthropomorphic fox) and starts reciting Chapter 3 of Richard Adams’ Watership Down. I smirk at your pain There’s a word for it. Yes, it’s schadenfreude – the pleasure taken from the misfortunes of others. It’s quite cross-cultural. The Dutch have a word leedvermaak, which literally translates as ‘suffer entertainment’ which sounds real fun.

The idea of making humorous art about suffering (or people making fools of themselves) is a bit non-PC. You have to be clever to get away with it. Performance art is the answer. Consider being witness to Australian artist Mike Parr’s legendary 1977 performance in which he hacked off his prosthetic arm accompanied by ‘blood’ spatters and horrified gasps. What a laugh everyone must have had when they realised it was a con. Those up the back probably found those of the front’s discomfort particularly hilarious. The Italian artist Vito Acconci’s performance Claim (1971) involved the blindfolded artist wielding a crowbar and two lead pipes, whipping himself into a frenzy and daring the audience to escape. People must have been convulsing with laughter at the absurdity of it all. Hollow laughter This is the only laughter permitted to contemporary artists. But it is most important that the audience appreciates your ironic take on whatever life serves up. It’s a sign of being grown up. And of understanding the finer points of gelotology (the study of humour for those of you who were away last week). For contemporary sampling it is hard to go past the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures which involve audience members mimicking objects, Laura Nova’s physical theatre which invites people to undertake extraordinary tasks at their own risk or Canadian artist Rodney Graham’s fictional activity loops such as a 17th century sailor on a desert island having a ground hog day relationship with a falling coconut. Is this a metaphor for contemporary life or what? Hollow laughter all round.

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FOOD.WINE.COFFEE fruit), muntries (a native berry), kumquats and feijoa. Working with Leslie in the Hill of Grace kitchen is a small but dedicated team. “It was important to get the team right. You can’t pull off good food without having a good team,” he says. It’s clear that Leslie is happy in his new home. Moreover, the location of Hill of Grace has a special significance for him. “I grew up watching cricket here when this was just an old tin shed. The restaurant is where I used to sit with my dad or whoever took me to the cricket. It was three or four levels down but this is literally the same spot.”

Hill of Grace

Hill of Grace, the latest addition to Adelaide’s dining scene, offers an exclusive view – the inside of Adelaide Oval. Chef Dennis Leslie gives The Adelaide Review the low-down prior

to the restaurant’s official launch. by Christina Soong

s Adelaide Oval’s Executive Sous Chef, Leslie has spent the last year producing food for hundreds of functions and thousands of people at the Oval.

On match days the catering team stretches to serve a maximum of 55,000 people, including 3500 to 4000 people who are served plated meals in the corporate, events and Audi Stadium Club member areas, and 320 people who enjoy a buffet lunch in The John Halbert Room. Hill of Grace, in the Audi Stadium Club members’ area, seats just over 120 people.

When Dennis joined Adelaide Oval mid last year, the notion of opening a new fine dining restaurant at the Oval was still just that. However, the restaurant was originally intended for the exclusive use of Audi Stadium Club members on match days only. “It was only this year, when the AFL season started, that [management] committed to having the restaurant open to the public five nights a week,” Leslie explains.

Things moved quickly after that and Hill of Grace launched at the end of August. Located on the eastern side of the Oval, Hill of Grace takes its name from Henschke winery’s acclaimed Hill of Grace – the restaurant is now home to the world’s only complete set of Hill of Grace Shiraz. This priceless collection dates from 1958 to the current release. “Henschke is an iconic winery in South Australia and the Henschkes loved the idea of [the partnership],” Leslie says. “They love the cricket, too, so it was a good match.” Local wine lovers will be happy to know that Hill of Grace serves only South Australian drops. While Henschke wines naturally take pride of place in the wine list, diners can choose from more than 160 wines by local wineries. It’s this commitment to creating something special that will help determine Hill of Grace’s success as a regular dining venue – after all, an upmarket restaurant at Adelaide Oval was always going to do great business on match

days. But Leslie and the team are banking on diners visiting on non-match days, too. “I’d like to think that this restaurant is for [everyone], for all occasions,” he says.

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“We did a lot of market research and we think we’ve got a good product.” Leslie’s food is influenced by his love of Asian and native Australian ingredients, his Filipino heritage, his time as Executive Chef at Hilton Adelaide and, specifically, at The Brasserie with its Seriously South Australian menu, as well as his time in England where he worked in restaurants favouring classic French technique.

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“People who have eaten here so far have commented on the different flavour profiles and combinations.” Indeed, a quick glance at the menu reveals the enthusiastic use of interesting ingredients like calamansi, (Philippine lime) tamarind, kohlrabi (a type of turnip), quondongs (a native

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36 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

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REVIEW:

CORIOLE BY PAUL WOOD

line-up of Reserve and Estate wines greets us at the Coriole cellar door. The Vita Sangiovese has an aromatic punch of chocolate and fennel; and sharp ﬂavours of dusty cherry, softened with age and a hint of licorice. The Dancing Fig is a Shiraz Mouvedre combination, a tribute to the ﬁg trees planted across the estate. This ready-to-drink soft and youthful red excites the palate with tastes of blackberry and a hint of savoury herbs. Our wine guide, Velvet, is a charming and cheeky seductress, shocking us with bunny-hunting stories and entertaining the patrons tasting their way through the fruits of the Lloyd family’s labour. We haven’t made a reservation, not realising that the Saturday lunch service gets so busy. It seems the word of Coriole’s new Head Chef Tom Reid has spread, and the atrium courtyard is full to the brim with people ready to tuck into

a spread of foraged fare. A table on the enclosed restaurant balcony serves as a more than suitable saviour. Without too much fuss, the table was set while we wandered the kitchen garden. Lush with all kinds of herbs, greens and edible garnishes, the once overgrown patch has since been lovingly tended by the estate gardeners and now kitchen apprentices spend their mornings gathering the freshest ingredients and trimmings for the dishes of the day. Seated with some of the most spectacular views of the surrounding hills, lunch is a simple but gourmet affair. House-made sourdough – served with lashings of cultured Woodside Cheese Wrights butter, alongside Coriole olives and extra virgin olive oil –makes for a greedy start and we order more bread before main course even lands.

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The follow-up platters du jour feature piles of pickled and roasted vegetables and salads, accompanied by all kinds of meats, cheeses and kitchen specialties. The salmon is prepared using more of the olive oil and scattered with capers and crunchy leaves from a locally grown succulent commonly known as ‘pigface’. From pigface to a porkhock terrine; a meaty little dish that works perfectly atop a crisp lavosh, piled high with kohlrabi salad that has good tang and a mustard seed kick. The pickled and roasted beet salad is a clear favourite, classically paired with fresh goat’s curd and presented like a little piece of artwork on the plate. A nettle salsa verde is smeared across slivers of beef carpaccio, and pickled heirloom carrots add colour, flavour and some necessary crunch. A central pile of cucumber ribbons scattered with pine nuts is perfectly acceptable, though perhaps unnecessary and

nothing compared to its delicious neighbours; though I’m quickly distracted by a corner dedicated only to cheese, including a ripe Woodside Cheese Wrights Pompeii, a subtle jersey-cow Cheddar, and a soft and oozy Brie. A wicked case of over-ordering comes next, with two dessert options artfully presented on some very sexy flatware. A thin slice of vanilla pannacotta snakes between crisp shards of delicate pastry; a sprinkling of fresh mint adds fragrance without overpowering; and a small pile of poached apple and perhaps pear is lightly spiced and adds balance to a dish of contrasting flavour. The last hurrah arrives in the form of a better-than-traditional chocolate fondant pudding, sitting on a mound of biscuit crunch. Edible flowers add a touch of colour and a quenelle of house made vanilla ice cream takes this dish to a place of sentimental pleasure.

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The trail ends with another stroll around the grounds to stretch our weary legs and drink in the rolling views, along with a ﬁnishing glass. Spoils of the day are loaded away and with little but the feeling of sated comfort and tales of culinary adventure, we make our way home along meandering country roads.

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PUTTING ADELAIDE ON THE FOOD MAP Since moving to Adelaide four and five years ago respectively, Chefs Duncan Welgemoed and Jock Zonfrillo have witnessed and are vocal about the exciting changes to Adelaide’s food culture. In their own words, the Restaurant Orana and Bistro Dom big kahunas take us through the local food resurgence.

Duncan Welgemoed and Jock Zonfrillo

FIRST IMPRESSIONS. BY DAVID KNIGHT

ARRIVING.

ingredients and, as it turned out, geographically it’s a fantastic place for what we do [Street ADL and Orana]; in terms of native ingredients, we’re right in the heart of the country. I was able to get native ingredients 24 hours earlier than I would have on the eastern seaboard.

Jock: I’d been living in Sydney for 10 years and there, like most of Australia, was this attitude of Adelaide being a backwater, a big country town. I moved here ﬁve years ago, drove here in a ute with all my worldly goods. At the time I was at the tail end of my second marriage – they [the family] came down in a plane, and I drove, which was a nice drive from Sydney. I’d never been here before. The ﬁrst thing I saw coming into the city was a huge billboard for Caffe Primo – prawn gamberi $9.90, pretty good eh. I thought, ‘Wow. I’ve arrived in Adelaide – this is it.’ A friend of mine owns the Austral Hotel, so I did a bit of consultancy for a year. I went to Magill [Estate] after that. It was a very different experience from Sydney, and from any other city to be honest with you. Adelaide’s a very different place. The only thing I’d heard about from here was San Jose Smallgoods, because they had it in Sydney and they were good. And I knew that Maggie Beer was down here. But once I got here and into it; there’s a phenomenal wine scene, incredible

N AC H E

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Duncan: I moved here four years ago. I knew nothing about the Adelaide food scene to be honest. I came here with Catherine, my wife. She was pregnant, and since we’d never had a child before, I thought I’d settle in a little bit, get a big money job. For a year I worked as the Executive Chef at the Adelaide Showground, which was actually really good – just learning big functions, the logistics of putting on a massive event. Then the Big Day Out came along and I got to cook for all my favourite bands that happened to be headlining, which was sick. You make the best of what you get I suppose, and once I’d done the [Royal Adelaide] Show and Big Day Out I’d done the biggest two events, it was time to get a real job. I went to Bistro Dom.

Duncan: When I moved here I thought, ‘I’m just going to eat at the best places in Adelaide’. Coming from the UK I didn’t think much of it. But I could see the ingredients were awesome. There’s an awesome wine culture, something that the UK lacks. I thought this is deﬁnitely a place I’d like to cook and show what I could do. There were some decent restaurants but there weren’t any ‘wow restaurants’, I suppose, without sounding like a dick.

And the food that I do is different. I always questioned, ‘Why aren’t they using X,Y and Z? Even down to the local stuff and not making the best of it. Nobody was taking to each other – none of the chefs. I was like, ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ It was odd. As a food scene, I found that a bit confusing. Back to what Duncan said, the produce and the people here were amazing. That was another reason for me to stay. Then I had a choice – do I go back to Sydney or do I stay here? I’ve got a child in each state and it would have been easy for me to go back to Sydney and open a restaurant.

Jock: Too late [laughs]. Duncan: What Lachie [Lachlan Colwill] was doing at The Manse was good. Jock: That’s true, there was The Manse. What else was there? Vincenzo’s. Auge. Magill [Estate]. I ate at all of them when I arrived, probably the same as what you did. You arrive and see what’s around town. Duncan: The Lane was another. Jock: Chloe’s. Fino – high-end places but that was about it. Much like Duncan, I had some great meals but I wasn’t blown away.

DOING THEIR OWN THING. Duncan: When I was working under the previous owner [at Bistro Dom], we had to stick to the line of corporate canteen. When I took it on and started doing my own thing, it became a natural progression from that. We thought, ‘Fuck it, we’ll do what we do and try to cultivate an individual style within that area’. We weren’t really concerned at that point what anyone thought of us. We just did what we did. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s explore a gap in the market’. Fine dining is hit and miss in terms of the trade, so we stripped it back, brought it back to basics.

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The Adelaide Review September 2014 39

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FOOD.WINE.COFFEE and Lachie [Colwill] have come through and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do’, and not given an arse about what anyone says about it. They’ve been fortunate enough to either have backers or someone who can assist them with that bold move because it is putting your balls on the table and saying, ‘Right, I’ve got this mad idea’. That takes a big set of balls and people with a wallet to achieve but once a couple of people do it, others look at it and go, ‘Yeah I can do it. I can follow my dream, I can do my own thing.’ Duncan: There was a massive hospitality brain-drain from Adelaide where the young hospos would go, ‘Fuck it. This place is crap. I’m going to Melbourne, Sydney’ and that’s where they’d stay. Now, they’re staying [here] and opening their own places.

Local places to check. Jock: I wasn’t thinking there’s a gap in the market that I could exploit at all. It was more trying to move to what I’ve always thought about, which is our current philosophy upstairs [Orana] and trying to get one step closer to that as the market would let me. We’ve always been the black sheep, when you say native ingredients they think witchetty grubs and worms and it’s not. Therefore it’s been an uphill battle and it would have been an uphill battle anywhere ... I think people are generally amazed that it’s not witchetty grubs or whatever, it is something refined and delicious. I’m very thankful we’re still in business today, and that’s because of the people of Adelaide at the end of the day.

Dining scene now. Duncan: People are throwing caution to the wind, cultivating their own style. One big thing we’ve been trying to fight against is that Melbourne/Sydney influence in our cooking. I think we have enough talent in this state to develop our own style. Jock: I think in the last couple of years a lot of guys have grown up a bit and just thought, ‘We don’t need to follow a trend’. We’ve got all these great ingredients here. Great chefs like Duncan

Duncan: Clever Little Tailor is my favourite bar. Orana is an example of a restaurant in South Australia that is cultivating its own style and is what other restaurants interstate will emulate. Magill Estate, what Scott [Huggins] and Emma [McCaskill] are doing there, it’s a really good standard. Jock: I enjoy Bistro Dom, and he’s [Duncan] opening a new restaurant later in the year, which is closer to his heart. Peel St restaurant, the whole Peel Street movement is fantastic and all those bars are super cool, nice places to go and hang out for a night because everything is close. Gouger Street’s Cork Wine Cafe. On Ebenezer, the guys have opened the Tasting Room behind us, which is fantastic. Great that we can send people there with a focus on wine as opposed to a bar. Restaurant-wise, love going to Hentley Farm, Lachie’s [Colwill] doing some amazing food there. It’s really cool – great food, and Lachie, in the time I’ve been here, he’s more than just found his feet, he’s cooking to his own style now; his food gets better year on year. Super nice to see that. Everyone goes to Ying Chow. When I bring people to town, nine times out of 10 we’ll end up at Ying Chow. I could name 100 restaurants we go to all the time. The thing is you could pick any of them and have a great night out. The service is so much better than it used to be, generally, around town.

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Jock: I think they do actually. They look at the glossy Harbour Bridge and Opera House and go, ‘Yeah we don’t have something iconic’. Well, we don’t have an iconic bridge or opera house, but quite frankly, if sitting in a car for hours every day is what comes with that, then surely we don’t want it. We’ve got amazing natural landscapes, which Sydney doesn’t have; that’s better than any harbour bridge you can put in front of me, I can tell you that right now. Duncan: I think this is why we’re the most vocal [about Adelaide’s charms]; we don’t come from Adelaide. We see it with fresh eyes ... Having someone like James Spreadbury, an Adelaide boy, coming back from Copenhagen [NOMA’s Restaurant Manager] at the beginning of the year, he was blown away. In the next couple of years, you will be able to put this city against anywhere in the world and it will be a food destination.

The Nomad Chef From the beginning of October, Jock Zonfrillo’s enticing show The Nomad Chef will appear on local screens after debuting across the globe on Pay TV and free-to-air channels. In each episode, the chef travels to a remote community to explore and learn their food and culture before returning to Orana to create a meal based on what he learnt. “It was incredible to see, an incredibly humbling experience going to a lot of those places,” he explains. “To come back here and put a dinner on as an abstract expression of my snapshot, although brief, into a dinner for today’s diners was also interesting. “It’s nice and natural. I hang around and learn from them for a couple of weeks, cook with them when I get the opportunity and then we have a bit of a party on the last day before I leave because inevitably they want to give you a nice send off. It’s a different food program to what’s currently around.”

Jock: I think everyone forgets that Adelaide gets labeled nationally as a big country town. What’s the population here? Duncan: 1.2 million. Jock: That’s about the same size as Copenhagen; it’s twice the size of Glasgow – that’s a fucking city. It’s not a big country town and it hasn’t been for quite some time. I think it’s a misconception by people who haven’t been here. When they do come down, chefs who have never been here before, and they eat at a few places, and drink at a few bars, they think, ‘Okay, it’s really cool here actually’. And then you start talking about the lifestyle, where you’re not siting in a car for two-and-a-half hours; 20 minutes to the hills, 10 minutes to the beaches, it’s much easier for us to conduct business in Adelaide than any other city. And it’s beautiful.

bistrodom.com.au restaurantorana.com

Welgemoed’s New Restaurant The Bistro Dom chef will leave his award-winning Waymouth Street restaurant to open a new bar and restaurant later this year on East Terrace. Welgemoed will collaborate with fellow Happy Motel member, designer James Brown (MASH), as well as Paul Glen and James Hillier (Golden Boy, Rocket Bar) on the yet-to-be named restaurant that will have a capacity for 80 diners and will be influenced by cuisine from South Africa and its surrounding areas, where Welgemoed is from. “It’s basically going back to my heritage,” Welgemoed explains. “We’re focusing on southern Africa for the first launch until we can start getting into it. What’s really interesting is that South Australia and southern Africa’s flora and fauna are quite similar. It’s easy for us to do and there are so many recipes. It’s what I cook at home. It’s so diverse and no one’s doing it, really. If you think of African food you’re thinking something really homecooked but it’s so much more than that.”

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Room With a Grandvewe Spend even a small amount of time with Grandvewe’s Diane Rae and you cannot help but be caught up by her vibrant energy and entertained by her many cheese tales. BY LYNDA GRACE

holiday in Tasmania changed Rae’s life. In 2001, she moved the family from Maleny in Queensland to Birch’s Bay in Tasmania, 40 minutes south of Hobart, to establish a vineyard. As a way to keep the weeds down between the rows of vines, she brought in dairy sheep, starting with a herd of East Friesland sheep.

the story of a French woofer working in the paddock when the restaurant became busy. She asked him to spend the day plating cheese. “I was amazed at the presentation of the cheeseboards being delivered to customers,” she says. “I congratulated him on his attention to detail. Turns out he was a three-star Michelin chef on holiday.” Rae answered some questions about Grandvewe, below.

The vines are gone but the sheep remain. Rae initiated a breeding program, crossing the existing East Friesland herd with the Middle Eastern Awassi breed for a hardier sheep, the Grandvewe dairy sheep breed.

How does the Tasmanian climate work for sheep’s milk?

Using cheesemaking skills gained from study through the University of Melbourne, Rae transformed the milk into the ﬁrst wheels of Grandvewe cheese. Now, together with her daughter, co-cheesemaker Nicole Gilliver, and son, Marketing Manager Ryan Hartshorn, they make up Grandvewe Cheese, an organic farmhouse sheep milk dairy and cheesery. Over the years, Rae has employed ‘woofers’, volunteers under the Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) scheme. This is a program, which began in England as a weekend ‘on-farm’ experience for city slickers keen to get their hands dirty, and has been operating in Australia since 1982. They ﬁnd tasks that suit the woofer’s personality and interests, whether it be helping make or pack cheese, or working outside with the sheep. Rae tells

It’s the Tasmanian terroir. We have the cleanest air and it’s a good climate for growing grass. Sheep like the cold climate but don’t like getting their feet wet, so for three months of the year during winter, they are housed in the ‘Sheep Hilton’ – five-star ovine accommodation where they get bed and breakfast. If it’s a fine day they will be allowed out to wander during the day. This is also where they go to have their lambs. When lambing, each mum and bub have their own stall for a month and given time to bond. At the end of the month, the bubs are weaned on to grass and grain and mums become working mothers. What is your favourite recipe using a Grandvewe product? I use the White Pearl as a stuffing for baked mushrooms. I also serve White Pearl instead of tartare sauce with salmon. What’s next for Grandvewe?

In November we have been invited to be one of 27 Tasmanian artisan producers to be represented in a new development called Brooke St Pier. This is a three-storey glass atrium on a floating pier where all the ferries leave for places like MONA, Port Arthur etc, and is designed to give a taste of Tasmania. Does it ever feel too hard/challenging coming from a very different career?

Often, especially at the beginning. Learning how to look after sheep and creating the systems required to make it, not only work, but commercially viable. Now there are so many opportunities and being a family business with limited capital, the challenge is deciding which direction to take the business.

grandvewe.com.au

The more you buy South Australian, the more South Australians you support. Find out who you’re supporting, www.buysouthaustralian.com.au

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SOUTH AUSTRALIAN

Woodstock’s Well-Tempered Grenache BY CHARLES GENT

oodstock vigneron Scott Collett learned a lot of things from his dad – adding a little bit of something else to McLaren Vale Grenache was one of them. While Collett père – and until recently Collett ﬁls – usually opted for Shiraz to make the late palate of their Grenache linger longer, Woodstock are now using Tempranillo to hold the ﬁnal note. “He and I both found that Grenache on its own just needs something with a bit more tannin to lengthen it,” Collett says. “I thought Tempranillo just had a bit more of a savoury texture to it and a little bit of a grip, so 12 percent of that seems to work to give the wine a full stop.” The effect has certainly proved pleasing – it convinced the judges of The Adelaide Review’s Hot 100 SA Wines to reward the 2011 vintage of The Octogenarian Shiraz-Tempranillo with a top 10 place.

There is more than a slight frisson around Grenache, adorned or otherwise, at the moment. The long-time staple of McLaren Vale – it beat its Spanish companion Tempranillo into South Australia’s varietal palette by more than a century – is being feted by drinkers and critics alike. During September, the James Halliday roadshow is rolling into the town for a $95 masterclass devoted to Grenache. Halliday is touting the variety as the region’s “jewel in the crown”. Not that McLaren Vale hasn’t been angling for a bit of recognition on behalf of the grape: for a decade, a band of the Vale’s wineries has each been enthusiastically peddling a Grenache-based wine under the Cadenzia banner. For Woodstock, though, the 2011 Octogenarian was a death-defying wine. A damp and miserable vintage presaged doom – Grenache is very susceptible to mould and mildew – but somehow, Collet marvels, the swollen bunches came through “squeaky clean”. He says drinkers typically like the strawberry and raspberry characters that show up in his Grenache-based Rose, as well as the stronger cherry ﬂavours manifest in the dry red. “With that 2011, there was ginger and pomegranates and some quite interesting lifted

aromatics, but a soft and spicy palate that I found very drinkable.” In tune with the warmer vintage, he says the 2012 is a different, more robust wine that is also picking up prizes. Whatever the vintage, The Octogenarian sees only a little old and virtually inert oak, with the Tempranillo providing the “extra little touch of structure”. Collett says while Grenache doesn’t need age, it can take it, thanks mostly to its tendency towards elevated alcohol. He likes it to hit 14 percent: “To me, Grenache needs to ripen fully to get the full range of McLaren Vale characters.” The name of the wine pays tribute to the advanced age of the home-block vines, but may actually understate their years: “I’ve been calling these bush vines at Woodstock 80 years old for the last 20 years or so,” Collett says. The Octogenarian is part of what Collett has dubbed the Companion range, “wines with stories” that are aimed to be drunk with food and which are sold mostly at cellar door: The Mary McTaggart Riesling, named after his mother; The Pilot’s View Shiraz, in honour of his Spitﬁre-ﬂying father; and The Octogenarian, with its nod to the venerable vines.

The wine’s label portrays the Grenache as the bush vines they once were. In reality, they’ve been hoisted on to trellises to make them easier to get at. But make no mistake: this is the real deal.

woodstockwine.com.au

42 The Adelaide Review September 2014

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE Dark Chocolate Cake Dry cake mixes are easy to do at home and gives you complete control of the ingredients. This is a very easy but delicious chocolate cake mix that can be made in bulk and stored in the pantry until required. I serve it in four layers with whipped salted caramel in-between each one. Dark Chocolate Cake Mix Ingredients • 4 cups plain flour • 4 cups light brown sugar • 1 1/2 cups cocoa powder • 4 teaspoons baking soda • 2 teaspoons baking powder • 2 teaspoons salt • 2 teaspoons vanilla powder (if you can’t find it, add vanilla extract to the wet ingredients) Method 1. Place all ingredients into a large mixing bowl 2. Whisk until well combined 3. Evenly decant into two large, airtight jars (should be around four-and-a-half cups of mix in each jar) 4. Label and store until required Dark Chocolate Cake with Whipped Salted Caramel Ingredients • 1 jar of cake mix • 2 cups buttermilk • ½ cup of unsalted melted butter • 2 eggs

Food For Thought Chocolate Cake BY Annabelle Baker

t’s possibly one of the most popular supermarket lines of all time, and definitely one of the most timesaving inventions of the 20th century, but the ‘packet cake mix’ wasn’t the overnight success that the smiling face of Betty Crocker would have us believe. The great depression brought with it a surplus of molasses and a very hungry America. Cake mix was developed to provide the country with a sweet fix for less fortunate times and for the very savvy John D. Duff, a way of cashing in on a sticky oversupply commodity.

Duff, on December 10 1930, lodged the first patent for what is now known as ‘packet cake mix’. His 1930s gingerbread mix consisted of equal parts flour and dehydrated molasses with sugar, shortening, salt, baking soda, powdered whole egg, ginger and cinnamon. Baking at home would now only consist of three, mind-numbing steps: add water, stir and bake. Cake mixes continued to do well but sales would taper off when the housewives of the ‘40s and ‘50s found the simplicity of baking a cake from the packet too easy, almost to the point of undermining their role in the family kitchen. Now, several American cake mix manufactures have listened to the homemakers and developed the extra step of adding fresh eggs, a simple solution that resulted in a more superior end result and reassured housewives of their baking prowess.

The only thing missing was the icing on the cake – literally! The further invention of ‘packet frosting’ was fully embraced by the consumerist era of the US and then, baking was completely revolutionised. Unfortunately, the ingredient listing of today’s packet cake mixes aren’t as simple as Duff’s original 1930 recipe. This rather humble concept is now the face of some of the worst displays of additives, flavours and E-numbers on our supermarket shelves. The reassuring smiles of the all-American housewife might have got this product of convenience this far but as we start to ask what’s inside the box, one can only hope a shift towards ‘real food’ is heard, resulting in another chapter in the history of the packet cake mix.

@annabelleats

1. Preheat a fan forced oven to 180 degrees 2. Line and grease a cake tin with a removable base. 3. Place the jar of cake mix in a large mixing bowl 4. Lightly whisk the buttermilk, eggs and melted butter 5. Add the wet ingredients to the dry cake mix and stir until well combined 6. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean 7. Leave to rest in the tin for 15 minutes before removing and allowing to completely cool on a cake rack 8. Liberally decorate with icing or frosting as desired Whipped Salted Caramel • 350g light brown sugar • 200g unsalted butter • 1 cup of thick cream • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract • 200ml whipping cream • 1 teaspoon salt 1. Bring the brown sugar, butter, cream and vanilla to a gentle boil 2. Reduce for five minutes 3. Remove from heat 4. Add the sea salt (adjust to taste) and chill in the refrigerator overnight 5. Add the whipping cream and, with an electric whisk, beat until lighter in colour and the consistency of whipped cream

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014 43

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE I recently visited Corey at his farm in Mypolonga; the buffalo are imposing animals and I found them almost frightening when I met them, however they boast a timid disposition I did not expect. They raised their noses high into the air sniffing us out as we arrived. Once settled, they contentedly began to chew the cud not unlike cows. Their lovely long eyelashes and serene dark eyes are magnificent, and I immediately fell in love with them and their babies. In my short time involved in the dairy industry I have seen dairy farm after dairy farm close its doors predominately due to the deregulation of milk pricing – needless to say I was very pleased to see one reopen its doors. Perhaps the robust nature of the animal paints a picture in people’s minds that the resulting product will be robust in flavour. It is quite the contrary, however; sweet and elegant is where I would put it.

Milano Cucina offers casual, friendly contemporary Italian cuisine. With its Euro-hip style this clever Italian kitchen and diner offers an extensive menu range including a large selection of coffee, home-made biscuits and cakes.

We are looking forward to Buff popping up on select menus around the country.

CHEESE MATTERS Buff BY KRIS LLOYD

oat’s milk is by far the most seasonal of all the milk that I use. When in season, there is a rich abundance that is rarely rivalled by other milk sources. The animals wean their young and are left with bulging udders of fresh and rich spring milk. After 15 years of making cheese, I still get excited about this time of the year, reintroducing many cheeses after the winter milk drought. However, given the 15 years that have passed since I began at Woodside, nothing excites me more than something new. This year, the sight of not only baby goats roaming the pastures but baby buffalo too brought a broad smile to my face and a barrage of ideas through my head. About a year ago, young dairy farmer Corey Jones from Mypolonga visited me asking if I needed any more goat’s milk. My answer was (of course) afﬁrmative – you can never get enough of that delicious milk. Before we parted ways – and I must admit it was an afterthought – I said, “If you happen to have any sheep or buffalo milk, I’ll take that too”. This was met with a confused look but I assured him I was not joking. With no buffalo dairy in South Australia and no sheep being milked on the mainland, their respective cheeses are almost non-existent and if I have learnt anything from the food ‘biz’ it is that you should never give up the opportunity to pursue a point of difference. To his credit (and my luck) Corey set off to do his homework. He discovered a buffalo dairy herd in Victoria belonging to an elderly couple

looking to exit their farm. Opportunity had knocked. Admittedly some minor adjustments were needed to the Jones’s family herringbone dairy to allow the buffalo’s bulk into the milking aisles, but recently we took in our first delivery of buffalo milk. While I had a rough idea of the style of cheese I wanted to produce it was not until I had the milk in my hot little hands that I really knew for sure. Buffalo milk is quite unlike any other milk I have worked with. Typically, it contains a higher solids content than cow’s milk – due principally to elevated levels of fat. So whereas cow’s milk contains around 12 percent total solids, goat’s milk around 13 percent and buffalo milk is around 16.7 to 17.7 percent. The flavour of the milk is clean and fresh and it is pure, almost blinding, white. When used for cheesemaking, it produces a white cheese that has an unexpected sweetness. I decided on a few cheese styles for our buffalo milk that are simple and will allow the milk to be the star. Our experience making lactic cheese with goat milk over the years has proven to be a success as we applied this concept to the buffalo milk-making some adjustments for the fat content. The result was a powerful yet fresh curd that I affectionately refer to as ‘Buff’. Without a moment to spare I ventured out to hear some expert opinions. Jock Zonfrillo, owner and head chef of Restaurant Orana, polished off three quarters of a 200g tub of Buff curd almost without realising during a leisurely chat recently. He commented on the perfect acid development and seasoning, and immediately found a place for it on the menu. Chef Simon Bryant loved the rich creaminess, upfront acid and flavour, and was completely taken by how clean and fresh it left the palate. Chef Tom Reid of Coriole Restaurant exclaimed how keen he was to get his hands on the product to use with quondongs and crispy saltbush.

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» Kris Lloyd is Woodside Cheese Wrights’ Head Cheesemaker woodsidecheese.com.au

CORIOLE FIRST OIL 2014 IS NOW RELEASED Celebrate the olive harvest with Coriole’s premium extra virgin oil, available from good food stores all over Adelaide.

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44 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

FEATURE

Olive Oil and Wine Wine and olive oil are linked historically, geographically and culturally. BY BRIAN MILLER

hey share a common Mediterranean origin and to archaeologists are signifiers of a civilised society. Plant a vineyard or olive grove, install a wine or olive press, and you are no longer a hunter-gatherer. You are ﬁxed in place, a centre of attention, and before you know it a civilisation has risen around you. That said, analogies between wine and olive oil can be exaggerated. They are really more like complementary opposites, yin and yang. The marketing and labelling can seem similar and that’s no accident, as the consumers are identical and some companies make both. Olive oil in Australia is where wine once was. Over decades, wine names evolved from generic (Claret, Burgundy) to varietal (Shiraz, Chardonnay) to regional (Barossa, Coonawarra) to bizarre (Lucky Lizard, Devil’s Elbow). Inﬂuenced by that trend, olive oil labels are increasingly showing a “vintage” (more accurately the year of harvest), the olive varieties used, a region of origin, a persuasive story and an alluring design.

As olive trees followed the vines and spread across Australia, they sunk their

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gnarled roots in a diversity of districts, from cool and verdant to hot and dry. As a broad generalisation, cool climate oils tend to be elegant and spicy while those from warmer regions are rich and robust, but there are so many exceptions even experts hesitate to pontificate. Is regionality important? Joe Grilli, maker of Joseph Olive Oil, says, “Different regions produce different oil styles, as with wine, though I don’t think it matters much yet to the consumer”. Mark Lloyd from Coriole agrees that it’s early days: “We are more concerned about the absolute best quality for our oil rather than regionality”. A leading, nononsense olive oil judge insisted, “Ripeness of fruit at harvest dominates all”. The type of olive used is as influential as origin. As with grapes, olives come in a range of varieties, styles and sensual names – Picual, Frantoio, Koroneiki, Coratina, Corregiolla – each with its own distinguishing flavour characteristics. Often two or more varieties are blended to improve balance and synergy. What is obvious, and more important, is that quality has never been better. This is evident from the superb examples

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The Adelaide Review September 2014 45

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Olive OIL

In a previous lifetime Brian Miller was an olive oil importer but was reborn as an Australian olive oil enthusiast and judge

we are seeing at olive oil shows and the corresponding level of consumer interest and enthusiasm. Buy new season Extra Virgin Olive Oil, preferably local, from a reliable supplier with regular turnover, read the back label and trust your own taste. Look for freshness, restrained pepperiness, complexity and harmony. Use it liberally; olive oil is an ingredient, not a spice. Select the olive oil to suit the dish. A robust olive oil will rev up a rocket salad while a mild oil will really make a mayonnaise. When Jock Zonfrillo of Restaurant Orana judges olive oil, he brings a chef’s eye to the exercise and scores oils down if they are excessively robust and overpower food flavours. I am reminded of wine shows when subtle, savoury Sangiovese is muscled out by palate punishing Shiraz.

Spagetti Aglio Olio e Gamberi Rucola Milano Cucina ◊ Extra virgin olive oil ◊ Prawns ◊ Crushed garlic ◊ Chopped parsley ◊ Chilli ◊ Rucola (rocket) ◊ Salt and pepper to taste

Do try this at home. Drizzle Extra Virgin Olive Oil over steamed Dutch Cream potatoes, add a light squeeze of lemon juice, parsley, thyme, pink salt and white pepper. The olive oil will enhance the dish superbly but you should still be able to taste the potato. Serve with a crisp dry white wine, perhaps one made by an olive oil producer.

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Culshaw’s Restaurant Situated just off Rundle Street in the award-winning Majestic Roof Garden Hotel, Culshaw’s Restaurant features Head Chef Matthew Inkley, who sources the finest seasonal South Australian produce and native Australian ingredients to create a fresh and modern Australian menu. His spring menu has three main elements that highlight local olive oil: ◊ Tomato and quandong braised kangaroo tail and textured olive oil ◊ Macadamia crusted kangaroo fillet with pepper berry labneh ◊ Poached kangaroo sirloin with emulsified olive oil For the full recipe for this dish, visit adelaidereview.com.au

165 Tynte Street, North Adelaide, South Australia 5006 Ph: 08 8267 4032

www.danieloconnell.com.au

Email: info@danieloconnell.com.au Opening Hours: Open Daily 11:00am - close Dining menu: Mon - Thurs 12 - 3 pm 5 - 9pm | Friday - Sunday | All Day Dining

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.” Oscar Wilde

46 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

FEATURE / OLIVE OIL

Why Olive Oil? We Ask An Expert Brian Miller conducted a Q & A session with Rob McGavin, Executive Chairman of Cobram Estate Olive Oil BY BRIAN MILLER

What should shoppers look for when buying olive oil? ‘Australian’ and ‘Extra Virgin’ on the label. Unlike wine, olive oil deteriorates with age so a ‘BestBefore’ date is an important decision-making tool for consumers. Of the most-used cooking oils Extra Virgin Olive Oil is the only one that is not chemically reﬁned and rectiﬁed. It is 100 percent natural juice squeezed from the fruit of the olive. What does ‘Extra Virgin’ mean? It’s an indicator of quality. To be labelled ‘Extra Virgin’ the oil must be extracted from fresh olives using a mechanical process, without use of heat or any additives or solvents, and contain less than 0.8 percent free acidity. Are Australian olive oils more expensive than imported olive oils?

Currently in the market place this common assumption is incorrect. The value proposition for consumers is better here than anywhere else in the world. Only here can award-winning oils be purchased at such competitive prices.

of varieties will often give a better balanced oil with superior ﬂavour attributes. Were the recent international competition wins encouraging to Cobram Estate and to Australian olive oil generally? Yes, certainly. Australia is consistently producing some of the best olive oil in the world, a fact now being recognised here and abroad. On a wine label, the medals and trophies listed must have been won by that speciﬁc wine and vintage. Does the same apply to olive oil? Yes, and this is very important with olive oil as the fresher it is the better.

Does the region where the olives are grown have a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the olive oil style? It can have a small impact but in the overall scheme it is way down the list. The variety, the quality of the fruit at the time of harvest and how it is processed and stored have much greater impacts on oil quality.

How would you summarise: ‘Why Olive Oil?’ Fats and oils in moderation are critical to the human body. Extra Virgin Olive Oil is the healthiest oil to consume because it contains nutrients and antioxidants known to fight chronic disease. It is perfect for cooking and has a smoke-point similar to that of refined oils. It’s the best start, and finishing touch, to any pasta dish, and olive oil makes your vegetables taste better so you will eat more of them.

Are single-variety olive oils superior to oils made from a blend of varieties? They are fascinating to an oil buff, but a blend

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The Adelaide Review September 2014 47

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165 Tynte Street, North Adelaide. Seven days a week, 11am to midnight. 8267 4032. danielconnell.com.au

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146 Belair Road, Hawthorn. Tuesday to Saturday, Lunch from 12pm, dinner from 6pm, high tea from 12pm – 3pm. 8373 3711. lenzerheide.com.au

The Daniel O’Connell Pub & Dining Extreme dining in a comfortable space: The Daniel O’Connell has been brilliantly refurbished with an exotic nose-to-tail menu to match. Head chef Phil Whitmarsh wastes little in his kitchen, serving the least appreciated animal products (pig-ear schnitzel, a range of bone marrow choices) in brilliantly imaginative ways.

Red Poles Gallery, Restaurant, B&B Red Poles is a jewel in McLaren Vale’s crown, offering art, fine food and accommodation in the heart of the region. Daytime service makes the gallery and restaurant an ideal stop on a tour, or a perfect destination for a visit to the Vale. Food by head chef Chris Bone is locally sourced, with Red Poles dedicated to working with the surrounding community and producers.

Try: trio of choices Black fungus and a squid ink cracker add a dark edge to the snapper ravioli. The entrée is lifted by peas, local herbs and the quirky service of chicken “tea” (consommé). The free-range chicken Ballantine (Greenslades) is complemented by Hazelrigg Farm’s Jerusalem artichokes roasted and puréed with leek. Young carrots with carotene butter, toasted cumin seeds and fennel serve as the perfect side.

McMurtrie Road, McLaren Vale. Wednesday to Sunday, 9am – 5pm. 8323 8994. redpoles.com.au

MAJESTIC Luxury.ROOF GARDEN HOTEL

In the heart of the city.

Lenzerheide Restaurant Past Unley’s bustle is Lenzerheide, nestled peacefully back from Belair Road. Lenzerheide is well-known for their high tea, but their fresh, seasonal menu of timeless favourites is another of the restaurant’s highlights. For spring, Lenzerheide offers many seafood dishes, awakened with fennel and delicate fruit flavours.

27 Leigh Street, Adelaide. Monday to Friday, 7am to 11.30pm. 8231 5160. rigonis.com.au

Try: off-the-cuff degustation Marrow has a rich, smooth texture, which Whitmarsh exhibits beautifully in both the entrée (a flat-parsley and marrow-stuffed ‘cannoli’) and dessert: blood, marrow and chocolate macarons and ganache, with sweet and savoury shards and crumbs for exemplary texture. A tobacco gel adds a subtle spice to the dessert’s aftertaste. Additional to this is a succulent, unbelievably tender portion of ox tongue, served with an inimitable side of sprouting lentils, Brussels sprouts and Stilton.

Rigoni’s Bistro Rigoni’s has been a familiar sight in Adelaide’s west end for nearly 40 years. The menu – given in both Italian and in English – is rich with traditional dishes and more adventurous creations, always remaining true to the culture and flavour of Rigoni’s history. Try: Arrosto di quaglia con mozzarella, fiche e prosciutto Three neat quail scrolls stand proudly on a bed of textured black rice and parsnip purée. Delicate flakes of black truffle ring the plate, complemented by beautifully soft, meaty chestnuts. The quail stuffing – buffalo mozzarella and mulled figs – infuse the poultry with honey sweetness, while the wrapping of prosciutto adds a fabulous salty bite.

MAJESTIC ROOF GARDEN HOTEL The multi award winning Majestic Roof Garden Hotel is perfectly located in Adelaide’s vibrant East End of the CBD. Each of the 120 rooms are unique and luxurious, with modern interior design, king-size beds, free unlimited Wi-Fi in room and opulent bathrooms. 55 Frome Street, Adelaide 8100 4400 | majestichotels.com.au

View from Majestic Roof Garden Hotel

Try: pan-seared scallops with a pistachio crust, wild rocket, crumbed fennel, blood orange and chevre, and a walnut dressing The crusted scallops are firm and flavourful, brightened by the dramatic sweetness of the blood orange discs beneath each portion. The crumbed fennel contrasts nicely with the chevre, and the walnut dressing provides a subtle but necessary strength of flavour.

48 The Adelaide Review September 2014

TRAVEL

Great Southern Luxury

Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island (KI) was recently judged fourth top hotel in the world in the Travel + Leisure 2014 World’s Best Awards. The Adelaide Review discovers

what all the fuss is about.

ike many South Australians, I’ve visited Kangaroo Island with family and friends. We’ve clambered over the aptly named Remarkable Rocks, gotten up close and personal with sea lions and fur seals, and feasted on the justly famous KI marron (freshwater crayfish), cheese, Ligurian honey, oysters and wine. But my recent visit to the island was a significantly different experience: yes, I did all of the usual tourist things, but as part of a media group hosted by Southern Ocean Lodge, I did it in magnificent style.

Built six years ago by Baillie Lodges, Southern Ocean Lodge feels both modern and timeless in design. Seen from nearby clifftops or Hanson Bay below, the 21-suite lodge seems to hug the land like a sleeping blue-tongued lizard. It’s a stunning and environmentally sensitive achievement by acclaimed Adelaide architect, Max Pritchard. It’s the attention to detail that impresses. The immensely sophisticated but comfortable decor. The handmade plates by Sydney ceramist

Photos: Christina Soong

by Christina Soong

Malcolm Greenwood. My spacious suite and freestanding bath with beach views. The signature toiletries by Li’tya using sustainably wild harvested Australian ingredients. The soothing music always playing in my room when I return. The complimentary bar fridge stocked with excellent wine, juices, artisan cheese and snacks. The environmentally friendly fire in my suite lit every night, by unseen hands. Nothing but nothing has been overlooked here. Even the toilet roll holder – a tan, handstitched leather strap – is special. We spend the next three days sightseeing, eating and drinking. We enjoy four of the Lodge’s signature experiences: Wonders of KI, which covers Cape du Couedic lighthouse, Remarkable Rocks, Admiral’s Arch and a fur seal colony; Canapés and Kangaroos, which is exactly how it sounds; Seal Bay, a visit to Australia’s third largest colony of Australian sea lions, and the Coastal Clifftop Trek, which offers striking views down the coast. After long days spent exploring the rugged beauty of the island, it’s a relief to return to the sheer luxury and warm hospitality of the Lodge at night.

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We are introduced to some of the fine wines in the Lodge’s impressive cellar over nightly predinner drinks and canapés. After drinks we move into the adjacent dining room for dinner. The food at Southern Ocean Lodge is exceptional: chef Tim Bourke clearly loves his work. His food is elegant and well balanced, showcasing the fabulous local produce and native plants found on the island. For serious food lovers, Southern Ocean Lodge hosts a one-week guided KI Food Safari with daily excursions to some of island’s best food and wine producers each August. Barossa legend Maggie Beer and chef Mark Best (Marque) were this year’s Safari Leaders.

Southern Ocean Lodge Kangaroo Island southernoceanlodge.com.au Price: Packages start from $2,700 per person twin share for four nights including all dining, premium beverages, mini bar, and all signature excursions. KI Food Safari packages start from $7,350 per person twin share for seven nights, including the return Regional Express (Rex) flights between Adelaide and Kingscote, all KI Safari excursions, KI Food Safari kit and standard inclusions. Getting there: a 20-minute flight from Adelaide Airport via Rex. For self-drive excursions, catch the 45-minute Sealink ferry from Cape Jervis on the mainland to Penneshaw on KI.

As a KI Food Safari teaser, Tim Bourke takes us on a one-day tour of the island. We visit Island Pure (artisan sheep’s cheese), KI Fresh (free-range geese), Island Beehive (organic honey), The Islander (the Australian winery of French winemaking royalty, Jacques Lurton), Parndana Campus (aquaculture) and boutique distillery, Kangaroo Island Spirits (KIS). It’s enormous fun getting to know the producers and sampling their products. On the morning of my departure I book a one-hour massage at the Lodge’s spa. I am something of a massage aficionado and this one, conducted by a serene, softly spoken therapist, is up there with the best. Just like Southern Ocean Lodge.

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THE ADELAIDE R EVIEW SEP T EMBER 2014

FORM D E S I G N • P L A N N I N G • I N N OVAT I O N

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50 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014

FORM

FLEXIBILITY AND OPENNESS The design of the Rundle Mall Redevelopment takes its lead from the South Australian landscape and embraces a new model of retail activation. BY LEANNE AMODEO

t’s easy to criticise the $30 million Rundle Mall Redevelopment; urban projects of this scale and significance always make for easy targets. Everyone has an opinion because everyone uses it and this invariably generates very unflattering commentary. The most recent debate centred on the type of trees chosen for the landscaping; there’s also been debate over the paving, the lack of cover and insufficient seating arrangements. These discussions continue to play themselves out over social media and talkback radio, with no sign of abating.

Mall Redevelopment, the project has not been without its fair share of obstacles. “One of the main challenges we faced was re-grading the street,” she says. “It’s hard to make people appreciate what that involves, but when it became a mall in the 1970s they didn’t change the shape of the street, leaving it undulating, and this led to accessibility issues as well as a real issue with ﬂooding.” The key to improving these infrastructure issues was to put a central drainage line down the street.

Much of this negative commentary can be silenced with an understanding that what we’re judging isn’t yet complete – the project is only half-finished. According to Adelaide City Council, the current Stage 5, which is the final stage of underground and paving works, is on target for the scheduled mid-October completion date, followed by installation of the lighting, which is the final stage of infrastructure redevelopment. The project’s completion date is early 2015 and the Rundle Mall Management Authority will officially launch the new Rundle Mall shortly thereafter.

Rather than try to conceal it, Chilton embraced the line’s visibility and it became a major element that informed her resulting design language. It’s a clever concept based on a reading of the South Australian landscape; the way its natural formations have been created by both wind and water over time. “That central drainage line needed to meander up and down the space; to get the right amount of water falling as it does in a natural landscape we needed to make it shift,” she explains. “So that idea of the ‘meander’ became very important both as a way of moving people up and down the space and as developing the pavement design in response to that.”

For Cassandra Chilton, Senior Associate at Hassell and Design Leader on the Rundle

The paving works with the landscape theme in creating an organic pattern that oscillates

between lightness in the heavy pedestrian circulation areas and darkness in the smaller, intimate zones accommodating seating and landscaping. Each element of the design sits within an asymmetrical framework that is not repeated or replicated in any part, much like nature itself. It may seem completely random

and very far removed from what we’ve come to generally expect shopping malls to look like, such as Bourke Street Mall in Melbourne, but the positioning of the seating and landscaping is actually quite deliberate. Chilton has based it on a series of complex

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THE ADELAIDE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2014 51

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

FORM According to Chilton, “We spent a lot of time thinking about creating these areas that allow curation and collaboration of spaces so they can change in response to the requirements of different communities that use them. You don’t just build a kiosk in one spot and it stays there for the whole life of the mall anymore.” While this new retail thinking allows for dynamic movement and change in the form of pop-ups and temporary events and exhibitions, it will only work if the mall is properly programmed. This responsibility falls to the Adelaide City Council and Rundle Mall Management Authority who, by all accounts, are willing to embrace this new model of activation. But beware if it is not sustained, because while the ‘life’ of the mall now relies on pop-ups and temporary installations, without them it is in danger of looking empty and lifeless. Once the trees grow, however, they will not only provide shading, but also bring another visual element to the space.

diagonal movements that run across the mall. “It seemed wrong to apply a geometric grid over the surface because nothing lines up,” she says. “All of the laneways connect to the mall at different locations and all of the entrances to the arcades are slightly offset.” Chilton is to be commended for working with her existing site

conditions rather than against them and the mall’s new spatiality possesses a high degree of ﬂexibility, which was one of the driving concepts informing the design’s planning. The resulting openness is in direct contrast to how the mall functioned in the past. It was the

new design’s intent to allow people to see from one end to the other (so everything was moved from the middle to the sides) and to also open the site out to the rest of the CBD for a greater sense of connection. It has left the mall feeling overexposed, but what jars now should make more sense as the redevelopment unfolds.

O V E R

This greening of Rundle Mall will take time and requires patience, regardless of the current size of the trees or the reason for their choosing. One look at images of the Adelaide Botanic Garden from the late 1800s should remind us that they are an investment for the future, as all tree planting is. On the issue of time, it may seem like the Rundle Mall Redevelopment has taken forever (and it’s not even ﬁnished yet), but such is the nature of urban redevelopments. The mall could not have simply been shut down for six months, because traders and businesses need to continue operating and the public needs access, so the project’s stages have been spread out over an extended period of time. Criticisms aside, this redevelopment was long overdue and its completion is greatly anticipated.

adelaidecitycouncil.com hassellstudio.com rundlemall.com

A N D

A B O V E

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52 The Adelaide Review September 2014

FORM

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Danish designer Hans Wegner and Carl Hansen & Son, the world’s largest manufacturer of Wegner’s furniture, has every reason to celebrate.

by Leanne Amodeo

anish furniture design has a longstanding tradition as admirable as it is influential. Names such as Arne Jacobsen, Verner Panton and Hans Wegner have distinguished its history with an aesthetic that is characteristically clean and uncomplicated. It sets a high benchmark for emerging designers, especially considering the number of Danish mid-century designs that

Photo: Per Knudesen

Celebrating Hans Wegner

are now universally recognised as iconic. One such classic is Wegner’s Wishbone chair, which he originally designed for Carl Hansen & Son in 1949 and was put into production in 1950. According to Morten Larsen, Carl Hansen & Son’s Sales Director for South Eeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, it is the highest selling Wegner item they manufacture. The fact this year marks the 100th anniversary of the designer’s birth has further increased the chair’s popularity. “It’s also a significant milestone for us,” Larsen says. “Especially since Carl Hansen & Son is the world’s largest manufacturer of Wegner’s furniture and all of the manufacturing still takes place in Denmark.”

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To commemorate the 100th anniversary, the Danish manufacturer has launched Wegner’s CH88. It features powder-coated stainless steel legs; not a style usually associated with the Carl Hansen & Son brand, nonetheless, it is a fine addition to their existing portfolio. The family-owned company expanded its premises in 2001, replacing the original factory built in 1915 with a much larger one. From a business perspective the expansion has meant shorter lead times (which previously had been up to two years) and increased production. “So we’ve been able to take on many of Wegner’s other designs,” Larsen explains. “It’s said he created over 500 of them and our new factory now has the capacity to accommodate much more.” With a workforce that has grown from 15 to 250 employees, Carl Hansen & Son boasts some of the best craftspeople in the business. As Larsen reflects, “Our focus is always at the quality level; we actually refer to it as ‘passionate craftsmanship’, because we have skilled workers that are working every day on promoting Danish design and keeping it alive.” Carl Hansen & Son invests in joiner apprenticeships and many of these people stay with the company once they are certified. In fact, some of their best weavers (responsible for weaving the Wishbone chair’s seat) have been with the company for 19 years. While Hong Kong-based Larsen was in Australia recently to raise awareness of these two new products, he was also here to promote the company’s support of Wegner.

During Melbourne Indesign he was a guest of Cult and when in Adelaide he was hosted by Aptos Cruz, both stockists of the Carl Hansen & Son brand, including Wegner’s designs. The Danish manufacturer’s most recent collaboration, however, has been with Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who designed the Dream chair. Released as a prototype in 2012, the final product launched at last year’s Milan Furniture Fair. “He made it as a tribute to Wegner,” Larsen explains. “So it doesn’t really get much better than that… Ando designing a tribute to Wegner.”

aptoscruz.com carlhansen.com cultdesign.com.au

10-14 October 2014 Adelaide

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For more information, contact the SA Chapter P 8402 5900 E sa@architecture.com.au

The Adelaide Review September 2014 53

adelaidereview.com.au

FORM DIA/NAG RUG COMPETITION Terrace Floors & Furnishings teamed up with the DIA, NAG and Danish carpet manufacturer ege for the only South Australian designer-based rug competition. On July 31, they announced the winner of this year’s competition, Tess Malpas, which coincided with Terrace Floors & Furnishings’ SALA exhibition.

Photos Jonathan van der Knaap

Fraser Porteous and Amy Patyi.

David and Tara Racher.

Adam Ross and Sky Harrison.

d’arenberg artisans launch On Wednesday, August 20, wine label d’Arenberg launched d’Arenberg Artisans at Loft Oyster & Wine Bar.

Photos Jonathan van der Knaap

Acacia Tredrea and Samantha Thompson.

Michael Randall-Smith and Michael Meade.

Kirsten Wallace and Deb Wallace.

Brenda Harris and Ray Yeulet.

Margot Muir and Kath Tidemann.

Simon Burgess and Rachel Whitrow.

Kate Abschberger and Jamie Manson.

54 The Adelaide Review September 2014

FORM

Shop by Design

by Leanne Amodeo

n the past 12 months JamFactory has undergone staffing changes, welcoming new, dynamic talent into the fold. Jon Goulder was appointed Creative Director: Furniture in January and, most recently, Daniel To and Emma Aiston were appointed joint Creative Directors: Product and Retail. It’s yet another coup for the not-for-profit organisation, especially considering To and Aiston’s international standing as designers of considerable merit and innovation. The couple established Daniel Emma design studio in 2008 and the following year

Photo: Rodrick Bond

JamFactory welcomes Daniel To and Emma Aiston as its new Creative Directors: Product and Retail. Wallpaper* magazine nominated them as ‘design graduates to watch’. To and Aiston won the Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award the following year and have since collaborated with some of the biggest design brands in the world, including Denmark’s Hay, UK-based Thorsten Van Elten and Tait in Australia. Their elegantly modern products are thoughtful studies in form and colour and they have recently expanded their portfolio to include furniture. While their studio space is conveniently located at the JamFactory’s Morphett Street premises, they do travel frequently. It makes them ideal ambassadors and also allows them to constantly feed their own pool of ideas and inspirations. But as designers, what is it they bring to the role? For Aiston, the fact they have

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a different perspective is the most advantageous part of their offering. “Our training and background hasn’t been traditionally businessfocussed,” she explains. “Instead, we’re interested in creating experiences, whether through environments or through the actual products themselves.” This emphasis on the user experience is a fitting foundation upon which to rest their strategy. After all, To and Aiston are now responsible for development and curation of JamFactory-branded product and the creative direction and retail operations of the organisation’s three retail outlets (two in the Adelaide CBD and one in the Barossa Valley). The designers are the first to admit JamFactory is an untapped resource and they are harnessing its creative potential to reinvigorate what is

already a solid retail proposition. Their five-year goal reflects a simple, clearcut vision that leaves no doubt they will achieve it. “We want to create the best range of products and retail environments in Australia that are recognised both nationally and globally,” says To. By working steadily towards this goal, they will be collaborating with JamFactory CEO Brian Parkes, who has been responsible for the major shifts in the organisation since his appointment four years ago. The three share a vision that is very much aligned, allowing them to ultimately strengthen JamFactory’s market presence and influence.

daniel-emma.com jamfactory.com.au

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